Music and Magic, Secularization and Spirit-Power

My friend Jude recently posted a nice little meme on my Facebook wall the the prompt, "discuss:" The photo was of some generic, romantic looking score and said "music is the strongest form of magic." 

As per my usual mode, I take this kind of sloganism too seriously, because it is, in effect, really easy to paint the world in very lazy abstractions and powerless metaphors, and so, people do. Were we to replace such trivialities with more depth, more creativity, we would simply have a better, more discursive, more democratic world. And of course, I already understand how silly it is to go after seven anonymous words in a systematic way, but I would hope that the discourse below would be helpful to those who find themselves in the position to confront these erroneous and terrible simplifications, especially when they are in dialog with music professionals who are trapped in these lazy modes of thought.

Commence bourgeois rationality and overly analytic argumentation: the statement makes two simultaneous direct claims, one ontological (that music is magic), and one evaluative (that it is the strongest magic). There is also a claim to be analyzed as an implicit suggestion arising from its image (that music is old scores in a bundle). The last one is preposterous enough, and a quick search of this blog for "Heidegger" will bring up my standard quote for arguments about the ontology of the score.

If we, for a moment, take the ontological claim as truth and focus on the evaluative claim, we see little more than Plato's hierarchy of the arts in the Republic. There, Plato develops his "art imitates life" aesthetics by judging the closeness of the reflection of life, as given through each category of art. Music is the highest form of art because it is the most representative of itself; it reflects life through what he thought was pure emotion, where architecture, for instance, doesn't so much reflect life, but is an ornamentation of a necessity for shelter (even if it is shelter for a deity). Further, in Book III of the Republic, Plato makes it well known that the affective work of music is dangerous, because it is so easy to translate affect into action. This leads to Socrates' idealistic ban on particular modes, scales, and instruments. This line of thought is still rampant in Western culture, but it is only as true as social fact can support it in a particular place and time.

A good way to test Plato (on the general and universal affective power of music) is to play songs on a jukebox in a bar that specifically repudiate the assumed identity of the bar and/or its patrons. If Plato's concerns are still valid, the music will transmit some overwhelming emotional power and reshape the individuals' character. Putting techno on in a country bar will be problematic, but not because the music is doing some emotional violence as music... It is about individuals taking over the physical space with sound waves and imposing their individual musical will on the other patrons who are not sympathetic to the music (for a handful of reasons that are ultimately social truths). Authoritarianism, for Socrates, is a generative force for control; the techno fan in the country bar is attempting the same coup, just without the power to do so.

Music is uniquely suited for such experiments not because of its universal qualities, but because of its universal portability. I am not necessarily interested in making this argument purely about mediums and materials, but it should be clear that the definitive ontological qualities of music, its relationship to the voice, and its ability to happen anywhere there is air, form the basis for music's specificity. Any claim that would evaluate music's "strength" against other forms of art or ritual or production would necessarily address the ontology of music, and work out to social truths at every level. The "capital t Truth" that Plato is looking for is an essentialist cage (befitting, as he could very well be called the inventor of essentialism). The universal essence of Beauty and Art, is, obviously, an illusion, since it is not capable accessing socially constructed truth. If art defines itself locally and socially, it is more likely that relative truth, from medium to medium, genre to genre, requires an interest in the emotions being reflected, the knowledge of the production process, &c. Without being able to see the larger picture of freedom of creation and freedom of interpretation, generalizations about the work of art become authoritarian and arbitrary, just as Plato's do. So goes analytic philosophy to this day, and so reads the meme. Strike one: music is nothing without relative social truths, so music cannot be evaluated against other art objects, at least not without a great deal of specificity.

The specificity that is offered by the image, does, however, suggest that Western music as noted in Western notation is the music which is magic. We need only note this, that the slogan is pointing toward the common practice period composers, because it suggests a disconnect with particular modes of production. That is to say, it attempts to make all composers into Mozarts, gifted prodigies with mystical powers for creating great art. And of course, such a model makes Beethoven look like he was ill-suited for being a composer, because his work was laborious, not magical.

And here is the fun part: the syllogistic truth that music is magic. Western languages, since Greek, have a marked distinction in the form, source, and direction of power, but the two do overlap, or at least may overlap (depending on how socially true it can be made). Mousikos, from which we get music, is the techne of the Muses, the art through which the muses can be brought into the world. The word magikos, on the other hand, is the art done by the learned man, the magos, the mage. In this sense, it is possible to envisage the overlap, as magic could be the embodiment of a Muse, performed by a mage.

It is unsurprising that the two would fit together in pre-modern European culture, not to mention all non-European cultures (which developed radically different local truths). Of course, due to the conflation of magic with illusion (which did not happen until the mid-19th century), magic is, ironically, weakened to the point of embarrassment. We must, in our defining and basic apprehension of this word, remember that today is indeed today, and that the meme suggests a possible conflation of music with illusion, as much as with ritual.

As an adumbration to a point below: illusion fulfilled itself as a grand performance art in the 18th century, as secularized magical ritual in the wake of the enlightenment, which had caused the emancipation of culture from religion. This transformation corrupted "magic," alienating it from that which gave it its ritual power. Before magic became illusion, it may have been impossible to claim that music was mysterious in a dismissive way, but in modern parlance, conflating music and magic certainly strives toward trickiness and falsehood contained in music, the negation of illusion.

But is music still magic, or capable of being magical, in the classical sense? The historical development of music, magic, and social life is speculative, but important. To address such an issue, I'll refer to two musician/philosophers with different points of view on what is important about the separation of music and magic: Theodor Adorno and Dane Rudhyar.

Dane Rudhyar (1895--1985) is a scarcely known French-American musician, philosopher, composer, painter, poet, novelist, theosopher, and astrologer. I have recently been studying his text, which is often called Art as a Release of Power (1928--1930), a series of seven essays that describe an entire, unique philosophical system. Rudhyar's most important influences are Nietzsche and Oswald Spengler, author of Decline of the West (1918). Rudhyar's thought, like Adorno's, is an unspecialized series of interpretations making up a full model of the world, disrespectful of limits to the work that can be done in speculative thought. For Rudhyar, the only thing worth talking about, in the end, is the power for humans to build their metaphors and develop them into actions that support a "universal brotherhood." In a few shining moments in these essays, Rudhyar encapsulates the project of Marxist cultural speculation, while still being somewhat apart from that tradition.

The beginning of Rudhyar's book looks for the homologue between musical intervals and social organization, and explains that consonance and dissonance are, when mapped onto society, tribal and pluralistic, respectively. Working through this lens, and always being careful to make positive analogies that facilitate a better, more universal world, Rudhyar later works through an entire theory of history, a la Spengler, with "spirit-power" at its core. Spirit-power is the work of individuals, through sacrifice, to bring a new idea to the world, and for that idea to expand to its greatest possibility in a culture or civilization. Instantly distinguishable in Rudhyar's conversation is the role of theological thought, and the language of spirituality, which he scrupulously redefines in a way of reclaiming what was lost through the secularization of Western culture. Deniz Ertan, writer of Dane Rudhyar: His Music, Thought, and Art, is fully aware throughout her analysis, that Rudhyar's work is somewhat unbecoming of a modernist philosopher, which contributes greatly to the lack of scrutiny given to his philosophical work.

Rudhyar asks specifically, in his essay "Art as a Release of Power," "what is magic?" He feels the weight of illusion's commingling with magic: "The word has become the synonym of fraud and charlatanism; and this is most unfortunate, because it was an excellent word which expressed perfectly well etymologically and otherwise an idea which the world needs intensely today." He continues with his definition, stating that "magic is merely the release of power through an efficient form by an act of will. It is in fact life itself; but life in terms of human characteristics, destiny and will-power." (emphasis original) In Rudhyar's mind, the concept of magic was a way of bringing form to abstractions. Gods that never existed were made real, visible, and touchable by art; their constituent powers gave power in the minds of man.

An example he gives in subsequent pages is an Indonesian dagger where the handle is the image of a "weird and monstrous face," a god of war or hunting. "... is [the dagger maker] attempting to create 'beauty?' Indeed not. The word probably means nothing to him. What he wants is to conjure the elemental power whose cosmic function is to kill, to force this power to incarnate into his sword; why?... so that the sword may kill better." There is power, built of abstractions, that needs to be willed by humans to make it real. This fits perfectly with the Greek sense of magic, since the dagger maker is a learned man, making a practical art from his knowledge, bringing it into the world to do physical, actual work.

Rudhyar argues that the loss of the sense of magic turns Western art into impractical, needless prettiness (earlier, he stated that Western art is better at building ornate frames than it is at building paintings to go in them). He would rather art be filled with this power, spirit-power, created by individuals and for all who would join in with the artist to sustain power and gestures of meaningfulness. Of course, if we are capable of such powerful acts, we are responsible for using it in an ethical manner, to benefit civilization (the entirety of humanity) by releasing them from the limits placed on their social relations. Such a world starts with pluralism, the full acceptance of individual difference (dissonance, harmony), and not sameness (consonance, the womb).

The difference between this view of the world and Adorno's is fundamentally tied to their respective differences in the theory of history. Where Rudhyar would say that the spirit-power of individuals to transform the world is always possible (but often defeated by reactionary ideas), Adorno's negative dialectics show that not all historical ideas can form a synthesis with each other, and hence, progress and development can stop. He creates the negative dialectic of secularization in the opening essay of Aesthetic Theory (1961--1969 [1997]), "Art, Society, Aesthetics."

"The basic levels of experience that motivate art are related to those of the objective world from which they recoil... The act of repulsion must be constantly renewed."(AT, 6) The way Adorno sees art's role in society is a reflection of what is not in the world. It is then, the individual who creates their own world, with bits of the world (material: bricks, scores, frames). This means that art strives for autonomy from the entire world, repudiating the world as it exists for a world its own. In this, the realm of the sacred was an historical fact, and art sought freedom from the sacred by employing the profane. The synthesis of the profane with art allowed it to find new types of autonomy, clean of the lies of religious metaphysics. Adorno would be referencing, here, Beethoven and Schoenberg, more than anyone else.

Beethoven's profanity was his autonomy from the church, throughout his career, whereas Mozart only gained that autonomy in the latter third of his life. Without needing to serve a metaphysical lie, Beethoven's life was the repudiation of the economic and social world (freelancing fairly unsuccessfully), and so, his music was also the repudiation of the contemporary bondage of form. (See Rose Rosengard Subotnik, "Adorno's Diagnosis of Beethoven's Late Style.") Schoenberg, on the other hand, was repudiating the world of tonality, the bourgeois common sense of music, and creating its antithesis. By doing so, Schoenberg, for Adorno, was able to create a secularization of music itself, not against the sacredness of a religious metaphysic, but against music's accepted ruling language of consonance and dissonance in moderation.

"[The] realm of the sacred is objectified, effectively staked off, because its own element of untruth at once awaits secularization and through conjuration wards off the secular."(AT, 6) This, to bring back Rudhyar's Indonesian dagger, is the process of looking at the handle as if it was beautiful, that the handicraft of the maker was somehow valuable, regardless that the subject that adorns it never existed. In this way, the objects of the world, for Adorno, lose their power because they are no longer true or universal. I doubt that Rudhyar would disagree; Adorno's social criticism often lacks his own position, to a perilous extent, and it makes it hard to figure out what he is looking for in this process. Besides, Adorno had already tenured his "Resignation" in The Culture Industry, saying that there is no positive action that seems to matter in the field modern social thought.

In Adorno's "Theories on the Origin of Art," (AT, 331) the dialectic of enlightenment is brought in as his overarching historical force:

... strict positivism crosses over into the feeblemindedness of the artistically insensible, the successfully castrated. The narrowminded wisdom that sorts out feeling from knowing and rubs its hands together when it finds the two balanced is--as trivialities sometimes are--the caricature of a situation that over the centuries of the division of labor has inscribed this division in subjectivity. Yet feeling and understanding are not absolutely different in the human disposition and remain dependent even in their dividedness. The forms of reaction that are subsumed under the concept of feeling become futile enclaves of sentimentality as soon as they seal themselves off from their relation to thought and turn a blind eye toward truth; thought, however, approaches tautology when it drinks from the sublimation of the mimetic comportment.

Thus, we can see Adorno conflicted about the dialectical nature of enlightenment, which sought to free the West from religious lies and supplant it with empirical harshness, because it may have ripped away the possibility of feeling and emotion along with it. In this sense, the conception of music losing its magical process, having been secularized into l'art pour l'art, possibly cut itself off from a considerable amount of feeling itself, and ironically, perfected itself in a scientific manner. The irony here, is supplied by Adorno's interest in Hegel's "end of art," that art may have only been possible at a particular moment in history. Great art, says Adorno, was a feature of a secular society, because it was able to detach from the lies.

Again, the difference between Adorno and Rudhyar comes to a historiographical difference: where Adorno believes that art freed itself from lies and developed itself as a great form during this period, Rudhyar sees music and art as the Prodigal Son, who has wandered away and felt the harshness of the world, and would presumably be better off reunited with his source of power. I think a shorthand for explaining the differences of the two philosophers can be given by how seriously they take Niezsche's Madman, which I will reproduce below for those who have not read it in full. Rudhyar is interested in reestablishing what made us spiritual, but doing it now, on our terms, without an unobservable metaphysic controlling us. Since we are in control of the character of our society, if we were all to act in a universal manner, one which promotes difference and cooperation, society would change. It is now only a "seed-idea," one that needs to develop to its fullest possibilities, one that art could channel into action in the world.

Adorno's focus is more detailed and directed to what he calls the "dual character" of art, that its only options in modern life are to either be a commodity or cultural authority:

For a society in which art no longer has a place and which is pathological in all its reactions to it, art fragments on one hand into a reified, hardened cultural possession and on the other into a source of pleasure that the customer pockets and that for the most part has little to do with the object itself.

In this sense, the work of society, its irrational relations and structure, make art ineffective as a transmission of power. Because of this ineffectiveness, the superstructure and base both need to change to enable art to have a revolutionary character, one that has been stifled by the negative dialectics offered by the enlightenment. That is to say, under the current conditions, the ideas of the ruling class are too difficult to defeat. Rudhyar's point would be that there just has not been enough power invested in defeating them.

So, I suppose, if I must create an answer here, I must say that the two of these philosophers (whose viewpoints are companionate, that is, work dialogically and never break the ability for their ideas to be discussed together) assume that the time for good ideas is just historically not now. With more and more force to secularize and lose individual power in art, Rudhyar placed his thoughts in the world to reinvigorate "the new man" (a direct resynthesis of Nietzsche's ubermench), of whom there are few. Adorno worked to make better terms of social analysis in the popular consciousness, of which, a few have stuck; ultimately, the forces of the ruling class are not seeming shaky, and we have changed little in the past 150 years.

Is music magic? The problem is that people want it to be, for the wrong reasons. There are still pedagogs in the academy that believe and transmit this to their students, so that they can perpetuate a sense of doubt, one that is usually conflated with pluralism. The reason for this doubt is to keep people from committing to music, or justice, or revolution, or anything. When people are not committed to their ideals, they are easily controlled by others. Those others are sometimes Lacan's Big Other, sometimes "bourgeois stinking life" (as Rick Roderick called it), or worse, they are individual authoritarians basking in their dualities.


Epilogue, Nietzsche's Parable of the Madman:

Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly: "I seek God! I seek God!"---As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? emigrated?---Thus they yelled and laughed

The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. "Whither is God?" he cried; "I will tell you. We have killed him---you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.

"How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever is born after us---for the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto."

Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they, too, were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke into pieces and went out. "I have come too early," he said then; "my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than most distant stars---and yet they have done it themselves.

It has been related further that on the same day the madman forced his way into several churches and there struck up his requiem aeternam deo. Led out and called to account, he is said always to have replied nothing but: "What after all are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?"

Source: Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882, 1887) para. 125; Walter Kaufmann ed. (New York: Vintage, 1974), pp.181-82.]

Estranged Art Labor, the Ontology of Interpretation, and the Ethics of Musical Consumption

Aesthetics, that branch of analytic philosophy that tries to tease out the formal logic of art, has often boxed itself into a model of the art object that can be essentialized, eternal, and logical. The primary mode of determining the essence of a class of objects is perpetually strained by the need to unseat art from the world and find unworldly, transcendent truth, and requires the deletion of the human subject as viewing the art object.

Because of this complication, the art object usually needs to be found in the object itself, divorced from its social situation in the real world, as well as divorced from the art laborers, who presumably would provide some answers about the "logic" of art. In Arthur C. Danto's article "The End of Art: A Philosophical Defense," the philosopher gives a compelling case that aesthetics is no longer capable of dealing with art. The argument stems from his interpretation of art in the 1960s, where art was perfectly capable of defining itself without the aid of formal logic (this 6'×6'×6' block of chocolate is indeed, just chocolate; this 6'×6'×6' block of chocolate is art because it resides in a gallery). The frame, as sociologist Erving Goffman would point out, is what gives a social structure to the object and the presentation in a way that defines its function and the identities and roles of the actors. Since social frames are, indeed, explicitly social, formal logic and essences have little to contribute to understanding the difference between art objects and any other. It is the personal meanings of objects, and how actors bring them to interpret the objects that define art, it's influence, and even its existence.

It will suffice, presently, to mostly leave the realm of the difference regarding objects and art objects. I will mention Heidegger's conception just to clarify that such distinctions are easily understandable in ontologically oriented discourse. In "The Origin of the Work of Art," Heidegger works toward an art object as having both material and nonmaterial existence, with the material being nothing more than a means (equipment) for the work of art to build that nonmaterial component, itself the artistic component of the art. A score of Beethoven's String Quartets, as he says, "lie in the publisher's storeroom like potatoes in a cellar." It is the immaterial constitution of the pieces, our imagination of them as an entity, their performance, their historical significance, the theory of their construction etc., that make them art.

One way that Beethoven's art objects share in the 6' by 6' by 6' cube of chocolate is the labor in creating the piece, labor in performing it, labor in hosting the performance, etc. ad nauseum. The labor characteristic of objects is a universal in both art objects and mundane equipment. Just because it is a universal, however, does not mean that we are talking about an essentializable character... It is historically and culturally particular in all instances. Unraveling the material history of any artwork, or better yet, social structures for work in the arts, will guarantee a solid foundation for understanding the art object, the people who make them, and how interpretation for the subject arises and proceeds.

Terry Eagleton, with his materialist aesthetics and literary criticism in Criticism and Ideology, figured that any piece could be understood most fully in these terms, by tracking ideologies that are embedded (he would say produced) in literary works by the productive realities around them. Vulgar as it may seem in reference to his project, or better yet, to Marx's project on which I will rely heavily, our task here will be to pinpoint the ontology of art through leveling of all laborious production. Fundamental characteristics of labor do matter in particular, but also in general, as a structure of objects leading to their social identity, use-value, and interpretation more broadly. I will work toward this end despite the ability for the conversation to fall into banality. The connections here (the relationship between the art laborer and their production, the interpretation of their work, and its valuation) may be obvious, and may have just spent the last 160 years being subtext to all works on artistic ontology. Since these points are not identifiable as "common sense," I will proceed as if I have something valuable to say.

Estranged Art Labor:

The product of labor is labor which has been embodied in an object, which has become material: it is the objectification of labor. Labor’s realization is its objectification. Under these economic conditions this realization of labor appears as loss of realization for the workers; objectification as loss of the object and bondage to it; appropriation as estrangement, as alienation.

Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.

When Marx proceeded through the logic of production and what it means to the laborer, he assumed the position that labor is wage labor and that the means of production made the producers alienated from their work. Of course, the majority of labor (at least, the majority of the Western economy) does fall into this category, and has, unrelentingly, since Marx's time. What Marx may have missed was that estrangement is systemic in non-wage labor, that is, contracted, project-based, artistic, and free production, as well. The reason for this blind spot is the ubiquity of objectification in all forms of production, and Marx's criticism is largely about a lack in capitalist economy's ability to logically establish the valuation of an inescapable feature of human life: objectification itself.

There remains an unclear boundary in Marx's work, one which he would probably simultaneously reject and endorse. On the positive side: his analysis is about how political economy treats the objectification of labor, or more pessimistically, has no ethical system for valuation. The structures that exist in production all seem to set up a "war amongst the greedy -- competition." Social/political/economic structures, as in the case of all structures, have the capacity for a establishing an ethical judgment inside of them, but in our historical moment, never develop one; Adorno's project of watching late capitalism become valorized beyond the point of redress becomes the guide for how the development of equitable systems and fair judgments has become impossible over the past century. But Marx's consideration of political economy as a greedy war shows a conception of monopolistic capitalism, not anarchistic or early or reformist capitalism. The social structure, as his optimism and rationality still holds, could tolerate a certain amount of equitable, humane treatment of labor (or else he would have never been politically active, just as Adorno was "resigned" from activism; see "Resignation" from The Culture Industry). It did not develop to do so because of capitalist ideology, which has no drive toward fair or logical behavior.

Of course, Adorno finds fault in the production itself, as nothing more than the extension of the greedy market: 

What philosophy once called life, has turned into the sphere of the private and then merely of consumption, which is dragged along as an addendum of the material production-process, without autonomy and without its own substance. Whoever wishes to experience the truth of immediate life, must investigate its alienated form, the objective powers, which determine the individual existence into its innermost recesses... But the relationship of life and production, which the latter degrades in reality into an ephemeral appearance of the former, is completely absurd... The reduced and degraded essence bristles tenaciously against its ensorcelment in the façade. The change of the relations of production itself depends more than ever on what befalls the 'sphere of consumption,' the mere reflection-form of production and the caricature of true life: in the consciousness and unconsciousness of individuals. Only by virtue of opposition to production, as something still not totally encompassed by the social order, could human beings introduce a more humane one.

Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, "Dedication."

Adorno perceives the structure and the outcome as inseparable, and tracks the social change toward consumption and away from production as an outcome of capitalist ideology. This added value to the conversation is not lost here in my critique, but it is still impractical to follow through every step. In this essay, I will grant a certain amount of autonomy to individuals, that is, the freedom to make choices about their own consumption, and believe that it is possible and important for individuals to at least make basic ethical decisions. I also recognize the fault in my assumption.

Further, contemplating estrangement and alienation is not a search for essential truth, it is only the search for that quality of an object, a commodity, in capitalism.  Marx's clear interest is in the qualitative value of the objects created by laborers, but sold by the owner of the factory. The unreconcilable inequity of wage labor is at the core of Marx's critique.

...Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham. Freedom, because both buyer and seller of a commodity, say of labour-power, are constrained only by their own free will. They contract as free agents, and the agreement they come to, is but the form in which they give legal expression to their common will. Equality, because each enters into relation with the other, as with a simple owner of commodities, and they exchange equivalent for equivalent. Property, because each disposes only of what is his own. And Bentham, because each looks only to himself. The only force that brings them together and puts them in relation with each other, is the selfishness, the gain and the private interests of each... On leaving this sphere of simple circulation or of exchange of commodities, which furnishes the “Free-trader Vulgaris” with his views and ideas, and with the standard by which he judges a society based on capital and wages, we think we can perceive a change in the physiognomy of our dramatis personae. He, who before was the money-owner, now strides in front as capitalist; the possessor of labour-power follows as his labourer. The one with an air of importance, smirking, intent on business; the other, timid and holding back, like one who is bringing his own hide to market and has nothing to expect but — a hiding.

Karl Marx, Capital vol. I, chapter 6.

This ultimately defines the necessity to look to the objects of labor: political economy masquerades as the freedom and inalienable rights of both parties to build objects together. The objects, as well as the actors, must be understood in dialog with one another, but there is undeniably an illicit question to pose to capitalist ideology regarding the quality of these relationships. In fact, the inalienable rights of the laborer and the owner are instantly challenged by the alien nature of the produced object. It is owned by the owner throughout the process: they own the material to build, the labor that builds it, and the material that is built.

I've been thinking about this, in part, because of an episode of Douglas Lain's podcast Diet Soap, On Episode #220, "Marx's Reluctant Idealism," Douglas and his guest Andy Marshall work through Marx's critique of Hegel, and the theory of alienation seems to be a sticking-point for the two of them. Marshall's reaction to the concept was extraordinarily similar to my own reaction the first time I read through the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts. It almost seems as though Marx is being a little touchy about the work of the laborer. It feels like Marx is saying that wage labor sentimentally detaches man from his production, which makes him spiritually bankrupt, whether or not he is making enough to escape monetary bankruptcy. Alienation from the world of objects, while capitalist production (as a social system) is continuously only concerned with such activities and their (random) outcomes, makes the laborer fundamentally detached from his own inner-life and creativity, and treats him as equipment to be sold, a commodity on a market, and leaves him to fend for himself in when it comes to the authority of the capitalist who bought him.

If man produces for a capitalist, as Marx points out, then he is not producing for himself in any way other than collecting the wages agreed upon in his contract. The more productivity that he introduces into the system, the less valuable his work is and the lower the quality of his contracted labor. Technology accelerates the process for the capitalist; with more robotic-type functions in the labor market, pushing one button may trigger the labor of what would have been hundreds of man-hours just a few decades ago. The unchanging ownership of the objects, the machinery to create them, and the drive to expedite this process is the fundamental concern of Marx throughout the beginning of Capital Vol. I. This is the key aspect that leads the creation of wealth in the capitalist political-economy (also known as the labor theory of capital).

But what is the difference between a laborer who does own their material and this laborer who must contract their labor explicitly? And specifically, what of the laborious manufacture of art? Since Mozart's arrival in Vienna in 1781, the role of the musician has been primarily as a freelancer. This socio-productive aspect has largely held for these past two centuries, and artists have been largely responsible for their own materials. There is a clear complication in the institutional support of academic artists, one that we will not delve into here. The objects of artistic creation still share fundamental identities related to the labor of producing art, which itself, does not greatly change under the contemporary conditions of academic patronage.

The Semiotic Model of Interpretation and the Necessity of Alienation:

At the core of the art object is the same process of alienation as in any other labor: work is objectified, and in some ways, can no longer belong to the artist. This process is inherent in the work simply by being "a work," a product already produced. In Marx's treatment of this process, every attempt is made to not go back to a primordial state of man to try to find the "nature" of production, since production, ethics, and economy are all historically and culturally specific. The production of music, just as any other object, creates the ability to transcode historical and cultural information with the work of the composer. This is often placed under the heading of "style," the things in the music which give a sense of an author, a period, the cultural function of music, the ideologies behind it, etc. 

In the musical semiotics model of Jean Jacques Nattiez (see Music and Discourse), this feature of the work is called the poietic level of the work. Streams of information that relate the author to their work build relationships between socio-historical facts and the identity of that particular work; knowing that Mozart was no longer working for the church, but was working for individual commissions, changes the information about how the music was written, what inspired it, and how the work must have unfolded. Musical elements can be tracked throughout the oeuvre of an a composer, an historical moment, or any other identifiable class of seemingly similar works. This process looks like a fuller conception of Eagleton's materialist criticism, because it would also take into account any non-material (that is, isolated philosophical and biographical) concerns, as more particularity about (dialectical) relationships formed by the art object, the viewer, the artist, and ideology. 

In the semiotic model, we can see that the author's world is imprinted into the object, but that alienation gives the ability for the object to be interpreted. The art object, in other words, is only one third of the equation, the thing that builds a relationship between the viewer of the art object and the author. Nattiez calls this the trace, the thing that is objectified labor, waiting for its birth as an object of discourse and relationship-building. The objectification process, in other words, is the process of becoming a part of the objective world (the world of things) by ceasing to represent only the author, and their situation. Objectification leads to valuation.

Certain aspects of Western music culture, however, point to a more marked and specific type of objectification than just an ephemeral or transcendent relationship: the score. Music literacy (which is taught in the academy under the title "music") places the primary function of musical expression on the interpretation of a performer, since the artist has already created the work. It is finished and objectified, except for the interpretational layers that are waiting for the performer to enable them. An interesting problem arises in performative interpretation, because it highlights a theoretically inherent ambiguity in all music and assumes that the performer is necessary not to simply convey what the artist has fixed into an object, but instead, resolve the ambiguity that is inherent in the notational system. In this sense, where composition would be what Husserl would call "pure music," the extension of a representational system of what can happen in music, the performer could achieve a state of "pure music performance," where they could possibly extend the meaning of the performative representation without violating the musical instructions. I've written at length on that subject on this blog before.

The locus of musical literacy and historical knowledge is a necessity for the "correct" interpretation to be deciphered by the performer and executed, which is itself a particularization of the work that becomes yet another laborious object. Estrangement, in other words, is happening twice in the performance of the Western canon: first, for the composer, who imbues an object with the artistic information that they can, and second, for the performer, who must imbue a performance with their interpretation of the composer's instructions. Beethoven has no control over how his work is performed today... he is dead. Experts and scholars can take a number of historical and social approaches to building systems of performative ethics, which tease out musical elements and streams of information into a hierarchy of importance and "correctness" of playing. These systems vary according to a number of metanarratives that govern all socio-historical ethics, and I base them on William G. Perry's theory of ethical development, with a great deal of conjecture added based on my observations of musical culture. (A companion set of observations for the music listener will be found at the conclusion of this post)

1) The dualist ethic: historiographical concerns in the dualistic mode move toward an historically accurate performance, such that the performance attempts to re-create the piece as it would have been premiered (often an impossibility because of historical distance); if it does not employ all characteristics of the historicity of the piece, it is incorrect. This is often the level of academics, having heard at some point what the correct way of playing was at a particular time, and they accepted it as the main outcome of a performer.

2) The multiplicitous ethic, marked by virtuocity, where the performer centers performance on their own prowess and bringing attention to their physical appearance, individual concern for the craft of producing music, and often, a drive toward the continuation of (often outdated) social practices; the multiplicitist knows that anyone could play music, but they must, themselves, do it better than anyone else to establish their own gratification (often as sublimated sexual desires) and authority; they defend their own authority over their work, since there seem to be so many options for how to play the piece but they do it for themselves, but will quickly submit to authority greater than their own (again, creating symbioses with sublimated sexual drives).

3) The relativist ethic, which is based on the understanding that there are indeed historical movements and styles that are options for any performance, but that any could be utilized. Relativist ethics are extraordinary open to different compositional and performative situations, but lack a decisive valuation of material. This ethical stage is correlative to a performer who will play because of difference or newness, and is attracted to those qualities in the work, because the performative experience offers another viewpoint that may be new. Often, however, such situations lead to reductive playing (just the pitches and rhythms), since the situation is different but not specifically attached to distinctive historical or contextual cues for successful performance. Successful performance is usually, in the relativist ethic, based on extramusical factors, such as communicating a "radical" message, or performing something to make people think that it is esoteric or "weird."

4) The committed ethic, characterized by a reliance on the freedom of interpretation and the application of a "presentist" mentality, where the performer socially and historically centers performance on contemporary philosophies and social structures in an attempt to reproduce the piece with a greater sense of relevance. This performer understands the labor of performance and composition as a cooperative relationship between people (composer, performer, and audience) in which meaning is freely established.

The existence of different modes of interpretation highlight the alienation of the composer and the distance between their will, as embodied in the musical object, and the will of those who would reproduce the works. At its core, the development of different performative ethics is only possible with alienating the composer from their work, because even a staunchly "composer intent" ethic assumes that the musical object cannot be repurposed or transfigured into other meanings. Were this the case, the score would not have any ambiguity in it, and the musical representation system (notation) would have probably developed to eliminate ambiguities if they were somehow a problem to the greater structure of musical performance and literacy.

Nattiez also refers to the esthesic level, the streams of information that arise from the interpretation of those works. The estrangement of the composer, who provided the initial labor and hence, the original intentions of the piece, are now met by the ambiguities of the object, and require the streams of information given by interpretation to decipher these ambiguities. The ethical situation of that interpretation is itself historical and social. The ethical interpretation of music can be fleshed out from any particular musical culture, individual choices, and style ideologies. These categories are, from my observations, the existent Western classical performative ethics (itself historical and cultural in name and content). As ethnomusicologist Thomas Turino has pointed out in Music as Social Life: The Politics of Participation, Western music culture is closely correlated to the capitalist mode of production: the function of music tends to be presentational, in a concert hall, because of the capitalist ideology of specialization; virtuosity is played up in capitalist cultures because of the ideology of the individual agent competing against the market; etc. Each facet of the social world that impacts the mode of production has musical consequences, and implies certain ethical systems that maintain music as a social institution, which explicitly socializes participants into an homologous structure that is just a subset of wider socio-cultural norms, as well as the contributing pedagogical necessity that leads to prolonging those norms.

Private Art Property:

Because of the homologous social nature of musical work as labor, cultures have had property rights built into the musical object in every tradition, even when a lack of property rights is what is encoded in musical objects. Anonymous composition is more indicative of traditional cultures, where communal property and collaborative production are more common modes of production. One tradition that falls into this category, and that I am familiar with is, the Central Javanese classical tradition, where composers basically never signed their name to a composed piece before the mid-twentieth century, since the music is culturally, communally, owned, as a portrayal of their social history and religions. This trend has changed, however, as Westerners have done a great deal of archival research and transcription, wanting to know a bit more about the genealogy of pieces for the historical record, and master musicians find themselves in teaching positions in the United States and the United Kingdom.

"Intellectual property," on the other hand, is an indicator of private property rights, and restriction of performance on the grounds of social institutions such as the market, labor, and ownership of the means of production. Even in Western culture, the musical work as property was markedly different for a composer who worked under patronage of the church, since the music would become communal property of the church for the edification of the congregation or the glorification of God. The historical move from feudalism to capitalist accumulation is mirrored (albeit much later, in historical terms) by Beethoven's lack of church patronage and individualistic move toward his own musical desires and goals. Without being able to mass-publish his works, his desire to write for an audience that may not exist for fifty years after his death points directly to the newfound emphasis on private property in European culture, and specifically the "liberal period." These attitudes simply hadn't existed in previous centuries, since the branding of working for posterity was condemned by the Catholic Church as immoral (see Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism).

The conception of ownership for Beethoven was spiritual in nature, about the authority and prestige of the individual composer, and this conception has had serious longevity in Western culture. As this concept of intellectual property has moved from an entirely spiritual and artistic (transcendent realm), into a legal and monetary realm, we see the ability for the commercialization of art that happened in the early twentieth century. The ownership function in music has dictated social function, use cases, and technological development in musical labor. The radio transmission of music prompted the public to buy records of their favorite tunes, reforming the social work of musical performance into a new venture, with capital at its core. This fundamentally undermined the previous commodity of music: sheet music. Of course, this material change has a distinct repercussion, which changes the music listener into a passive conduit, instead of a participating laborer in the creation of music (even if it is just playing and singing in the parlor).

On the industrial side, however, ownership is ever in the favor in the owner of the means of production. Even though the record industry utilized technology that lead to a greater freedom of "reproducing" (in Benjamin's sense of the word) performances by placing an object on the record player, the social formation of musical work in creating those objects developed to devalue the work of most musicians. Throughout the first 70 years of commercial music making, there are horror stories of the undervaluation of musical labor, stemming from the conception of what it means to "write" a copyrighted song: the owners of musical property are generally the persons who wrote the vocal melody and the words; studio musicians, musicians who play instruments on recordings (often without billing or recognition) were regularly given a flat fee for their services, which often involved writing a novel part for their own instrument. Despite being a presumably equal member of the group (their contribution to the recording is musically equivalent to the writer of the vocal melody), studio musicians rarely, if ever, were able to collect royalties on their work. They had no protection under the law because they did not own the means of producing the musical commodity, and received the contracted amount of money, with no say in how their musical labor manifested once it was controlled and distributed by the culture industry. Thus, the musicians who fell into this category became classed as "studio musicians," a type of musician whose function was not stardom or branding, but exploitation through music production technology, which sought increase the speed by which music was created and drive down the wages of performing musicians.

The estrangement of the art object allows this treatment in the same way all estranged labor makes it impossible for the laborer to own their product, to continue gaining from their own labor and its formation of commodities in the market. The law (in America, the whole of corporate interest enshrined by the ruling class while masquerading as empirical judgement by the proletariat) developed to protect intellectual property, including musical commodities, in the same way the owner of factories are recognized to have both the liability and the right to profit on the produced commodity. This right involves the use of the commodity in a way determined by a corporate entity or owner, to be exhibited only under completely restricted conditions, set by the owner.

And it is in this way that the estranged object finds itself presented for explicitly capitalist functions: licensing for use in other conglomerate works (film and television), use in advertising for lending meaning to another product (in the tradition of fascist propaganda), and the rights to distribution in physical or digital media. In regards to this last item, the consumer is limited in the ways that they may use the work, and, as we have seen develop in the past two decades of American law, are only purchasing a license that entails private contemplation of the object, and not a physical copy of the musical work. 

On the other hand, the law, as we have also seen, has been powerless to combat the privatization of the musical object, once it became portable through digital technology. Intellectual property, in other words, was designed for objectified labor alone, presuming that a physical medium was necessary to convey the musical object. Protecting the property rights of individual artists, unknowingly, was only feasible when the labor was physically objectified into a unique medium, a physical medium, not a digitally encoded one.

The Ethics of Having:

Intellectual property rights are clearly backed by legal ethics, which seek to make sure that labor is valued properly (that is, by the market) and that piracy does not make freely available that which should cost the end-user directly. It is a fundamental pillar of the rule of law in Western society. This is because of the valuation of success and deserved compensation are only measured in monetary forms throughout capitalist ideology. How, indeed, would you know your musical work is successful without a trade group like Billboard counting how many legal copies of your music were sold by legitimate retailers? For academic composers, if you are not being paid commissions for your new works, how well could you really be doing at your job? This viewpoint, however traditional and accepted it may be, has not been the focus of the music consumers since the inception of peer to peer file sharing in the late 1990s.

From the opposite direction, ethical consumption was never the goal of music fans, and as soon as technology allowed the consumption of all recorded musical objects without monetary consideration, listeners jumped at the chance. Rarely is it considered that the music listening public may have actually benefited from this in the educational and recreational aspects of musical consumption. Simply put, there is no reason to think that we have a more enlightened and musically literate population because of access to music. One would think that having a public with unfettered access to all recorded musical works would have an impact on overall musical education; an apt simile may lie in the fantasy that we suddenly recovered all of the documents lost at the Library at Alexandria. It seems, however, that the estranged labor of musicians continued in the use-value of musical objects; the privatization of musical experience into music-consumption plus subjective mystery, the lack of technical language in the average listener, and the unrelenting belief that music is irrational and disconnected from personal identities continued, and were all valorized beyond reproach. The average listener did not consume for broadening their own horizons, but instead, for re-presenting, on-demand, the music they already identified with that was already offered them by the culture industry.

This facet of music consumption illustrates the structural nature of estrangement: the ideology of ownership of the means of production, support of private property and private listening, and the lack of freedom by means of a lack of critical listening. The structure of distribution is not the content of the experience, nor does it mandate any particular viewpoint or ethics be upheld in the process of music apprehension. Even when the structure of the music distribution system was shattered, and replaced by a newfound social convention that looked more like an "open-source" and "fair-use" culture, the hegemony of popular culture circumscribed a ground-up advance in musical literacy (at least, one is not yet noticeable). Just as the nature of labor is regulated only by the culture that gives us estranged labor as nature, music listening is given as private and subjective, awash in personal identities without a critical analysis or understanding of identity formation with musical objects.

Where estranged labor can be circumvented by designing other structures for work environments (co-ops, communes, entrepreneurism, non-profit, and pay-what-you-will are all viable models that modify wage labor and work toward craft and collaborative ownership), it is still entirely the valuation process inside of that structure that determines the individual outcomes of artistic labor. It is still improbable that independent musicians and artists can survive in a culture that has privatized all musical action into a personal, subjective, and isolated experience. This is the world in which it is no longer possible to value any musical labor because it has been sold as a transcendent and invaluable object, as far as the capitalist ideology cares, since the market can no longer set any value for it, and so, sets zero for music's value.


The Ethics of Listener Use:

At its core, the estranged musical object does have something transcendent about it as a generalized form of identity building, but this relies on the relationship of the listener to both the musical object and their entire experience of life. The listener, in a very real and social sense, should feel obligated to understand the music that they "like" as much as they understand their daily motivations. In response to estranged musical labor, there remains, for those who are free to think and learn, a necessity to understand the grounds on which the object is created, its function, and the streams of information relevant to understanding this musical object. A dynamic model could be created that unravels personal identities and social knowledge of the world into a musical ethics that is unearthed from the possibility of being trapped in a single historical or evaluative model; this model, again, resembles William Perry's stages of ethical development.

1. Dualism
This initial stage holds that there is truth, correctness, falseness, and lies. In listening applications, a dualistic thinker says that there are many examples where someone seems to be laboring on "music" but that the product is so far outside of their context of what music means that such works are actually not music. In American culture, our two-party political system is the greatest example of dualistic thinking, leading people to believe that the correctness of one particular party over the other is the greatest chance at solving problems. This stage of development is associated strongly with authoritarian thinking, and can be seen in listeners who "like what they like" but only because they perceive it as the correct thing to like. Often, people who subscribe to a dualistic ethic develop affinities for things that are clearly offered in their family life, or by an industry that would rather people know exactly what they will buy before it is even made (or just buy reissues of the same albums over and over). The dualistic listener is overly critical of any music for which they do not think they have enough information to understand, because it appears to be a waste of time or resources.

2. Multiplicity
The second stage offers the first glimpse of relativism, where correctness and truth do not seem to lead to every answer to every question one could have about the social world. In Western culture, "hard sciences" promote the viewpoint that there is some relativity in the world, but that there are only things that we know to be true, and things that are not yet understood. In this stage of development, a subject moves toward an understanding that authority is not centralized, because asking a line of reasonable questions may end up in the answer "we don't know yet" (with the blind-spot being of no worth). This type of thinking, applied musically, is the listener who begins to realize that there is no grand authority governing their or anyone's musical tastes, and samples all types of music to find what their own subjective preferences are, and who they are. Characteristically, this would be the person who recognizes that "everyone is entitled to their own taste," and consider the end-game of musical consumption to be an act of freedom of speech. While this listener is an open-minded individual who does not reject or dismiss others because of musical listening, they do not have any ethical attachment to the work of those who do not make music that is appealing to their own subjective viewpoint. They are possibly critical of the music industry, but only if their primary selection for musical consumption is itself marginalized by the industry, or not understood by a segment of the population, while they believe that "their music" should be more popular than it is. This is the stage of ethical listening with the most privatization of taste; multiplicitists tend to not even talk about music as to guard their personal authority from attack.

3. Relativism
In the third stage, the subject becomes aware that context determines the ability to understand what relevance any fact or data may mean for any individual situation. Here, the subject is ready to listen, equitably, to any explanation of the context in which any problem resides. There may be a better or worse way of addressing the matter, and this subject will usually defer to an authority who has distinction (in Bourdieu's terms) in the field that the problem arises. Having already collected a great deal of knowledge about the different styles of music that actually exist, a relativistic point of view implies at least a basic layout of the musical world, and how musicians work toward different goals, make music that serve different functions, and pursue different aesthetic goals. No longer chiefly concerned with their own subjective tastes, a relativistic listener can now understand that musical work is indeed labor, and that the labor of a musician creates musical work (it is not just something that speaks to them, but something that exists in the social world). The relativistic listener understands that styles and productive methods have changed throughout the history of musical work, and know some of the ways that this has developed over the course of humanity. They can place themselves in any musical situation and gather enough streams of information to be able to get an idea of how this music fits in the world, and what it may say about the identities of those who are in that musical situation, and maybe even understand the appeal of a wide range of aesthetic goals. They are critical of musicians who seem to not understand the musical culture that they, themselves, are pursuing, but generally supportive of those who are in the process of learning how to be a part of that musical culture. This stage is somewhat liminal, and is more of a process than the others, as long as a sense of value and historical significance continue to gain influence inside of the listener's development.

4. Commitment
The final stage, commitment, is the ethical position that synthesizes the recognition of the relativist world with an ethical attachment to particular goals and meanings. The commitment stage is where ambiguity stops interfering with meanings in the subject's identity, and ambiguity does not debase any of the knowledge that the subject has. In musical commitment, a recognition of all forms of musical labor as a fully integrated notion of culture, and as a legitimate form of labor, lead the committed listener to support music which furthers a broader understanding of cultural life, historical development, and balancing the author's intended meanings with the listener's freedom to interpretation. In this scheme, the committed listener is cognisant of the state of music in the world, the necessity to support musical labor (as long as it is done in an honest, creative, and equitable way), and the advocation of musical understanding as a tool for understanding all other aspects of human life. Ethical development to this point creates a drive to collaborate and express the connections of musical work to human work more generally (pedagogy), strives toward dialog with others and education about disparate types of music, and works to support all those who participate in cultural, philosophical, and pedagogical fields who share this project. Commitment strives toward making the world better, implies a Sociological Imagination (from C. Wright Mills, where the actor looks to real world problems to propose solutions at any hierarchical level, and gives attention to making the world better instead of suspending bias to appear relativist), and collaboration instead of competition. Committed listeners are critical of views that discount human ingenuity and its ability to reform the world's structures in positive ways, and critical of industries who stand to profit from music in inequitable or predatory ways. They are also critical of music and musical education which furthers traditional or ideological concepts that lock listeners into lower forms of listening ethics. It would be necessary for a committed listener to be fully capable of understanding the streams of information presented in a majority of the world's music, a scholar of both music and culture in the most general ways.

It should also be pointed out that commitment is a critical pursuit: there is little chance that a committed listener will be content with the general ideology or a mode of production which does not create the conditions for furthering human life, creativity, and freedom (for both individuals and groups), or an ideology that the social world is in a constant state of natural harmony, i.e. the market.

The estranged labor of any musical object, in a world where all labor is objectified and brought to market, begs the question of value, one that can only be posed in a conversation that does not instantly conflate market forces and successful labor. The economic truth hiding inside of this question is that without support in the grander scheme of capitalism, music could, indeed, die an economic death. The music industry has claimed its own death since the turn of the century. Hegel, Adorno, and Danto have all worked on "the death of art," but never really thought that people would stop playing instruments or painting, just that the objects that art produced (and their localized mode of production) would change so radically through history that it no longer appears connected to itself. 

There is a real, existential threat to music, because it is systematically undervalued in market institutions, resulting in a class of laborers with their own distinct identity in political economy, and a systematic drive away from ethical valuation in the transcendent, meaning based realm (affective and epistemic alike). The death of art attacks both individuals and institutions. The threat is to lose musical institutions, the personal practice of music by individuals, and musical modes of thinking: the understanding of the cognitive, social, economic, aesthetic, philosophical, political, historical, technological, literary, and performative aspects of music, themselves equal parts of not only the constitution of human meaning, but the process of life, and our strategies that link the two.

A more equitable world would imply a broader understanding of the work of musical laborers, as well as other classes of laborers. The valuation of human experience, production, quality of life, creativity, and justice is left to the randomizer of the market system, and trusted to the mechanism of wage labor and its "fairness," despite being a consequence of the random interaction of an entire market system. We cannot leave it to market opportunists, finding exploitative patterns and holes in the system, to determine the musical life of the entire world. Since musical labor is objectified and the musician alienated from their work, it is the responsibility of listeners to provide ethical valuation and understanding to the labor of music. We must, in the words of Zlavoj Zizek, take the ideology more seriously than it takes itself. We must meet the ideology with the criticism that objectified labor presents the human element of musical objects, the identity of its producer as they march toward death, and give us their labor to show us who we are.

Phenomenological Aesthetics and Vulgar Aesthetics: Janet Wolff’s Aesthetics and the Sociology of Art

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.”