Reception in Distraction, or the Habitual Aesthetic

Walter Benjamin is extremely interested in the phenomenon he calls "reception in distraction" (The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproduciblity and Other Writings on Media, Harvard University Press, 2008, p. 40). He sees this sort of experience as central to our understanding of architecture. While we may stand at a distance and look at a building, admiring it on some visual, contemplative level, the majority of our experiences with architecture are primarily tactile and distracted. There seems, in fact, to be something about the entire sensory apparatus involved in touch that demands a certain distraction. Dr. Rasula made the point by an example: it seems perfectly natural for someone to say, "look at this," or even "listen to that," but it strikes us as odd to be told to "touch" something. Our tactile experience is not attuned to focused attention.

Benjamin sees in film this capacity for reception through distraction, for learning not by way of direct contemplation, but through the development of a sort of habit. In On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Schiller also seems to place the ideal receptive environment for Art in the realm of distracted attention. When meeting your audience, he advises the Artist:

The seriousness of your principles will frighten them away, but in the play of your semblance they will be prepared to tolerate them; for their taste is purer than their heart, and it is here that you must lay hold of the timorous fugitive. In vain will you assail their precepts, in vain condemn their practice; but on their leisure hours you can try your shaping hand. Banish from their pleasures caprice, frivolity, and coarseness, and imperceptibly you will banish these from their actions and, eventually, from their inclinations too (The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 2nd Edition, p. 492).

Schiller here is still interested in preserving the concept of high Art, which Benjamin largely rejects in his attempt to reframe the debate around a consideration of all those things which are considered outside the realm of Art and thus are ignored by the critical eye. However, the similarity between their suggestions for ideal audience reception cannot be denied; both have something to do with entertainment.

The passage from Schiller also contains an undercurrent of the propagandistic, as if the artist must be quite sneaky in the insertion of his "principles." Even Schiller's phrasing smacks of the manifesto. He paints the audience as a "timorous fugitive" which the artist must "lay hold of," and the current customs of the audience (his frivolity) the artist must "banish."

Benjamin saw in film's capacity for "reception in distraction" the possibility of a great boon to the proletariat, who might be educated by film of man's relationship to the apparatus. Schiller, too, saw in this receptive mode the capacity for positive social change. History, unfortunately, has played out quite differently. The film medium was hugely successful in spreading the propaganda of the Nazi regime, and continues to be dominated by those interested in personal economic and political gain. So too are many of the media forms that represented Benjamin's great hope for the proletariat's recognition of itself as a class - the television, the radio, the newspaper. And the type of Artist which Schiller was interested in developing remains designated largely to obscurity: in art schools, in English departments, in Music programs, in theaters, Schiller's Artist is still largely studied only in contemplation, rather than in distraction.

Wordsworth seems to recognize (and to some extent embody) this continuing contradiction. He at once recognizes the dilapidated state of the High Arts, which are "driven into neglect by frantic novels, sickly and stupid German Tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse" while he at the same time attests to the "indestructible qualities of the human mind" (Norton, p. 564). The eventual triumph of art (which in his mind is not too far off) he places in the hands of "men of great power" who will oppose the "degrading thirst" of popular culture "with far more distinguished success" than he himself can offer (564). How ironic, though, that Wordsworth insists on the employment in high poetry of the language and of the common man while simultaneously turning his nose up at the types of diversion that same common man seems to enjoy best. And he makes no attempt to explain how his "men of great power" might draw the major portion of humanity away from the "gross and violent stimulants" of popular entertainment (563).

It is part of Benjamin's interest to rectify this imbalance. If we are to make this transition toward the Good or True, he seems to say, it will not be by shifting the interests of the larger population to align with our ideas about Art, but rather by realigning our interest in the aesthetic to include those forms that interest the larger population to begin with. This idea in the hands of those who seek power, however, can have some very negative implications. Benjamin closes the Artwork Essay by attributing to the National Socialist movement the motto "fiat ars--pereat mundus" (Artwork, p. 42). And this condemnation of Nazi political aestheticism mirrors perfectly the words with which Schiller closes his Aesthetic Education:

Surround them, wherever you meet them, with the great and noble forms of genius, and encompass them about with the symbols of perfection, until Semblance conquer Reality, and Art triumph over Nature (Norton, p. 492).

This charge, minus the last 5 words which identify the Ideal in the outcome, suggests what all the greatest propagandists in history have realized. Namely, that if you can surround them "wherever you meet them" you can eventually reach the point when your Semblance, whatever it might be, will conquer Reality, will indeed become Reality. The Third Reich surely recognized in this charge a very specific opportunity, that very opportunity which Benjamin identifies as the "aestheticizing of politics" (Artwork, p. 42). By realigning the Ideal that is Art with their own political motivations, they could lay claim to that same Ideal.

These dangers (inevitabilities?) are latent also in Kant. I have already explored the difficulties which I see as arising from Kant's concept of a disinterested aesthetic, but that same disinterest quickly becomes dangerous when taken up as the ideology of a despotic political regime. Kant anticipates as much:

...however much debate there may be about whether it is the statesman or the general who deserves the greater respect in comparison to the other, aesthetic judgment decides in favor of the latter. Even war, if it is conducted with order and reverence for the rights of civilians, has something sublime about it, and at the same time makes the mentality of the people who conduct it in this way all the more sublime, the more dangers it has been exposed to and before which it has been able to assert its courage; whereas a long peace causes the spirit of mere commerce to predominate, along with base selfishness, cowardice and weakness... (Norton, p. 439)

Compare this with Benjamin's assertion that

All efforts to aestheticize politics culminate in one point. That one point is war. War, and only war, makes it possible to set a goal for mass movements of the grandest scale while preserving traditional property relations (Artwork, p. 41).

Both Benjamin and Schiller have high hopes for the ability of art (variously defined) to move people toward the morally good, but they both fall short of defining the method by which this movement should best be accomplished. They differ from Wordsworth, who still looks forward to a return to more concentrated study of Art. Benjamin and Schiller both hope to locate the work of Art before an audience who is distracted, who is not interested in "learning" or "contemplating", who is entertained and thus can be influenced on an level analogous with Freud's unconscious. However, they (and we) continually run up against a public whose distracted attention seems more naturally attuned to the influence of powerbrokers.

Or, is there something about the mediums of mass that make them more useful to the propagandist than the artist?

The Role of Performance, The Roll of Print

Marshall McLuhan saw a certain affinity between Shakespeare's time and our own. Both times, argued McLuhan, represented periods of transition in the status of print media. Of course, Shakespeare and we stand on opposite ends of the spectrum. What for his time was a growing acquaintance with print must be for ours a mounting estrangement. Which transition will prove more bitter? And for whom?

For McLuhan, our alignment with print media meant a transition into linear thinking patterns. Patterns which favor logical order, cause and effect, and individual attention. It shifted the function of words, too. Literate culture shifted "from the notion of words as resonant, live, active natural forces to the notion of words as ‘meaning’ or ‘significance’ for minds” (McLuhan, from his book The Gutenberg Galaxy, excerpted in The Essential McLuhan, 1995, Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone, eds., p. 114). It was probably with this mental and cultural realignment that Shakespeare was actively participating. McLuhan sees many of his plays as direct interaction with the themes of a new lifestyle influenced by print. (See his brief discussion of King Lear on pp. 108-109).

McLuhan continues: “Aquinas considered that neither Socrates nor Our Lord committed there teaching to writing because the kind of interplay of minds that is in teaching is not possible by means of writing” (p. 119). It seems to be this resonant and active character of language and interaction that performance to this day attempts to recapture.

Performance is, by definition, ephemeral. A video recording of a theatrical production does not constitute a performance. It is only in the immediate and fleeting interaction of artist and audience that we experience performance. It is an art form which cannot be captured and retain its status as Art. The oral tradition, in which performance plays a key role, demands the acceptance of a passing beauty. The tradition of visual media, including print, makes no such concession. Indeed, it is partially its physical permanence, its capability to speak to our own time and the next, which qualifies visual art as Art.

What role does performance play in what McLuhan considers our postliterate society? Some people go to plays, still, I suppose. More likely, they go to rock shows. Rock shows are almost entirely nonliterate. I don't see written music as playing a large part in the creative process of most rock and roll bands. Even lyrics fail to gain any real status in print. They are entirely aural within the context of performance, and in CD distribution appear only occasionally in tiny print in the liner notes. In fact, the pervasiveness of the (authentic or faked) photo reprint of the "original" handwritten lyrics of rock artists suggests, often written on napkins, scraps of paper, the back of a receipt, suggest their negligible status as written material, even for the artists themselves. With the rise of online music distribution, written lyrics are available online in several places, but have lost almost entirely any official status.

Knowing the lyrics is a different story. And of course written lyrics help with that, on a mass scale. However, most people learn lyrics to songs by listening to them often, and rarely by studying the written lyrics. (Consider the humorous stereotype: a person finds that they have been singing the lyrics wrong all these years. They shout, "Oh, is that what they're saying?") Personally, I find that reading the lyrics, especially while listening to the music, detracts significantly from the beauty of the experience. It can make the lyrics more difficult to internalize. It feels false, like I'm trying to hard to gain information from something that has it's home in emotion.

I like to characterize Performance as an especially tactile artform. In a performance, there is a limit to our concept of mediation. That is, mediation seems limited, though it may not actually be. What mediates a modern performance of Hamlet? The sound system, which is perhaps the most technologically advanced medium of modern theater, projects the performers' voices and is a very literal and limited mechanical extension of their capacity to speak. Make up and electric lighting play a similar role for their capacity to be seen, which in itself is an interesting necessity that is absent from almost all other art. It might be said that in performance, makeup and light play the same role in mediation that for television and film requires an entire technological apparatus.

And architecture plays a key role in the mediation of Performance. Benjamin, in the Artwork Essay, considers our reception of architecture to be especially tactile. In Performance, it is largely architecture which provides the boundary line (such as there is one) between Artist and audience. David Byrne gives a TED Talk regarding live music's relationship to architecture. He discusses the ways in which changes in architecture, essentially changes in potential venues and the accompanying shifts in acoustics, influence the choices that musicians make about how to create. The same could be said for any performance, which must inevitably be fit to the space in which it will be experienced. Architecture also plays a part in the auditory reception of the audience. It can even help to determine their expectations of the performance. One does not expect the same sort of performance at The 40 Watt as one might expect at Hodgson Concert Hall. For the philharmonic and the rock band to arbitrarily switch venues would create quite a stir. We as audience interact with the architectural environment of the performance in very specific ways. The same can be said for the performers.

I feel like in the case of live performances even those things we see in front of us (that is, those things we experience primarily visually) must be considered differently in that they are stricken through with the tactile. Performers, with their wigs, their make up, their costumes, are all a jumble of texture; the sets are simply architectural elements; the electrical lighting only serves to heighten this effect. The voices we hear are real human voices (we recognize them as such, even when amplified electronically, because of their immediate relationship to the performer we see in front of us); when Claudius storms offstage, we can feel his footsteps reverberate into our seats. This might be the reason that the experience of 'watching' a performance and watching a video of a performance differ so drastically. The video has been stripped of the tactile.

What relationship exists between rock lyrics and playtexts?

Some Conceptions of the Sublime

Kant's description of the Sublime is given short shrift in his Critique of the Power of Judgment (at least so far as it is anthologized in my Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism). Mostly, his understanding of the Sublime has a great deal to do with size, and I do sort of like the idea of the disconnect between those large things that we can "imagine" and the vast numbers that we can "conceptualize," so to speak. This is the Mathematical Sublime, and Kant says, "Nature is thus sublime in those of its appearances the intuition of which brings with them the idea of its infinity" (435). So, I'd imagine that the contemplation of space or vast oceans might be occasion for an experience of the Sublime.

However, Kant misses an opportunity (once again?) in his insistence that we take no interest in the actual purpose of the object we contemplate. He loves to use the flower as an example of beauty, of a true purposiveness that we can contemplate without reference to any actual purpose. However, it seems by allowing ourselves to follow that idea of purpose into the flower we might easily be exposed to some experiences of Mathematical Sublimity that, for Kant, are strictly off limits.

A closer examination of the function of a flower would expose to us the reproductive function that pollination holds for the plant. By way of the idea of pollination we might come to the complex interplay between flower and bee, and then between bee and beehive. (Say nothing of what connections we might encounter were we to pursue the idea of reproduction.) We'd encounter all of those bees working together in some way (there is some musical quality to it - vibrations and dances) to create something as fantastically complex and beautiful as a honeycomb. A consideration of the uses for the honey-comb might lead us to the bear (and thence no doubt to the storybook, to our childhood) or to the marketplace (and there find either the warmth of the kitchen table or the neon glow of the cereal aisle). Following either of these two lines of thought, in any of the many ways that they could be followed (not to mention the many ways in which they themselves interrelate), leads inevitably to a direct experience of the infinite, to our own interconnectedness in and with the natural world, and thus the Sublime, as represented in something as simple and "merely beautiful" as a flower.

As complex a web as this run at ultimate purpose may seem, it is one that our brains accomplish often and almost instantaneously. It is that sense of the interconnectedness of all things that is familiar to most of us in our moments of deepest clarity, and it seems that it comes, not from a refusal to invest interest in or account for the purpose of an object, but rather as a result of our total and instantaneous investment in the discovery of such a purpose. At its core it seems a Scientific endeavor, this deep inquiry into the nature of reality, but it nevertheless delivers us up to a true sense of the Sublime.

Burke is more willing to allow for the invasion of emotion into his conception of both the beautiful and the sublime, which he identifies as producing "the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling" (459). He recognizes as the source of these experiences some level of individual investment, and he seems to set beauty and sublimity on an oppositional axis. Beauty is associated with the experience of pleasure which Burke associates with our relation to "society;" Sublimity he suggests springs from our private fears and pains which he locates in our drive toward "self-preservation" (458).

Burke's conviction that "the ideas of pain are much more powerful than those that enter on the part of pleasure" would be interesting to follow into works like Star Wars or The Lord of the Rings which seem to suggest as much in their entire characterization of "darkness" versus "light." And yet, with very few exceptions, it is the powers of light - associated as Burke's beauty with pleasure and the larger society - which prevail.

It is telling that Burke ends with a list of oppositional qualities that he attributes to the beautiful (small, smooth, light, delicate) and the sublime (vast, neglected, gloomy, solid) and then comments on just such an experience as I outlined above:

In the infinite variety of natural combinations we must expect to find the qualities of things the most remote imaginable from each other united in the same object. We must expect also to find combinations of the same kind in the works of art. But when we consider the power of an object upon our passions, we must know that when and thing is intended to affect the mind by the force of some predominant property, the affection produced is like like to be the more uniform and perfect, if all the other properties or qualities of the object be of the same nature... (460).

Because Burke has positioned the two qualities of Beauty and the Sublime as fundamentally opposed to one another, he seems to want to downplay those incidences where we experience a combination. He skirts the issue with his appeal to "the infinite variety of natural combinations" as a source of what he seems to think of as an occasional mistake in the fabric of his dualism. Indeed, even for those occasions he insists, "does it prove, that they are any way allied, does it prove even that they are no opposite and contradictory?" By his lack of interest in pursuing the question, we are given his assumption that it has already been answered.

(An important [and relevant] note about my claims to the way that Burke "ends": I am, of course, still working out of my Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, and what I have given as Burke's ending is in fact the ending he is given by Leitch and the other editors of the volume. I find this both troubling and entertaining. Troubling in the knowledge that, in order to speak expertly on the subject I ought to follow all trails before developing my conclusion. Entertained by the knowledge that any attempt to follow those trails would last until eternity and thus preclude my ever finally forming my opinion. Furthermore, I detect even in this minor dilemma an interaction between the social aspects of pleasure and the private concept of pain, a fact which helps me be confident in my reservations regarding Burke's dichotomy).

Kant's Beauty

This post concerns the selections by Kant in the 2nd edition of the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. The selection is taken from Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment, which I understand to be his '3rd Critique'. I should say from the gate that I know little or nothing of Kant other than what the editors of this massive compendium have either selected for me to read or mentioned in their introduction to the selection. That is, I suspect that Kant's first two critiques (those of Pure Reason and Practical Reason) must bear heavily on his third, but what of the former is not specifically referenced or explained in the latter must necessarily (for the purposes of this post) be assumed not to exist.

That said, I have the distinct impression of several limitations to the understanding of beauty in Kant's Critique. 

The editors suggest that, for Kant and his contemporaries, the aesthetic quality of a natural phenomenon or a work of art "is seen as superior to all others" (406). In his aim to raise beauty to a level of human awareness that he sees as essential to our 'humanness,' it seems like Kant risks making his entire argument idealistic, and thus in no way related to what it means to be human.

It might be easier to begin by an exploration of what, for Kant, is explicitly not beauty.  Kant insists in a strict division between what one considers 'beautiful' and what one might consider 'agreeable' or 'good.' The latter two experiences, as described by Kant, are a great deal more familiar to my own interactions with the world, both natural and artistic, and so are a bit easier to explain.

Things that are 'agreeable' are things that make us want more. That is to say, if I am hanging out at a park, while there I might think about how beautiful the park is and lament the loss of so much greenspace in today's society and wish that there were more places like this one. Likewise, and perhaps while at the same park, I might see a beautiful woman and imagine what it would be like to have a relationship with her. For Kant, I made a mistake in calling both the park and the woman beautiful. Because I invested some interest in the park (by wishing that there were more like it) and in the woman (by wishing that I could have more contact with her), I cannot judge the beauty of either thing. I am too involved, so to speak.

Those things that are 'good,' according to Kant, are things which I invest some moral or ethical interest in. I might see a documentary about missionary work in Africa, which I might take as a beautiful expression of social justice. Contrarily, I might be repelled by the images from the Holocaust or the symbolic imagery of the Nazi regime. Here again, by investing my (this time moral) interest in the scene before me, in both cases I have precluded myself from being eligible to determine their beauty. 

Kant insists:

"If the question is whether something is beautiful, one does not want to know whether there is anything that is or that could be at stake, for us or for someone else, in the existence of the thing, but rather how we judge it in mere contemplation" (415). 

The ability to make this distinction of beauty is called "taste," and Kant insists that there is such a thing as good taste and poor taste, and that taste can even be taught.  He doesn't, however, give any indication of what a curriculum for 'taste-education' might look like, except to suggest that we must learn beauty through "exemplars." It occurs to me that in the idea of exemplars there is a sort of recursive loop of causality.  A begging the question, perhaps,which forever puts the onus of the Decision on a previous generation.  It suggests, I guess, that our current understanding of beauty is determinate solely on some previous historical or personal understanding. 

On a purely psychological level, it is as if to say, that what I find to be beautiful today, and to have that certain--je ne sais quai--is predicated entirely on my own, individual, previous experiences of beauty.  So taste is developed by experiencing a great deal of beauty.  Since Kant seems interested in the education of taste, it would seem a relevant question to ask, who points the way? Who takes on the education of taste to others?  And what effect do the opinions of those teachers have on the opinions of their students?  I suspect, a great deal.

Kant never ventures a guess, though.  He leaves the implication sort of out there, suggesting maybe that the answer is spiritual or religious or, it seems most likely, guisedly political. To deal with the problem, Kant structures a sort of end all, which he calls "subjective universality" (419). Kant wants us to be able to see something that we enjoy, an experience that Kant recognizes is an entirely subjective experience, and to lay claim to that object in a way that can be universal. He does this by creating a space in our mind for "contemplation" which is free from interest.

"Since...the person making the judgment feels himself completely free with regard to the satisfaction that he devotes to the object, he cannot discover as grounds of the satisfaction any private conditions, pertaining to his subject alone, and must therefore regard it as grounded in those that he can also presuppose in everyone else; consequently he must believe himself to have grounds for expecting a similar pleasure for everyone" (418-419).

Kant's explanation of this distanced state relies heavily on what he calls "a free play" of cognition (421).  This seems, for Kant, to end the argument.  This idea of "cognition in general" is the most concrete a definition for the inner workings of our minds that Kant is interested in pursuing.  For someone interested in Pure Reason, this seems like a shallow exploration, and I wonder if perhaps this is what Eagleton means when he calls the Kant's aesthetic an ideology.

To pursue the issue myself, then: I suspect, based on what I know of the current scientific understanding of brain functioning, that Kant's disinterested state of mind doesn't exist.  It seems that on a physical and biological level our minds are in a constant interaction with the world around us.  The act of seeing itself, something that is necessary even for Kant's "free play" to be set in motion, involves a hugely complex electrical interplay between external world and brain. (If, that is, one is even prepared to accept the dichotomy.) Moreover, the existence of the human subconscious as explained by Freud casts immediate doubt on man's ability to actually understand, or reason with, the functions of his own mind. When the way that reality is framed in your mind bears only a tentative relationship to the abstract "real," as Kant's seems to suggest previously in his discussion of "things-as-they-are", all Pure Reason seems resigned to the realm of the post hoc.

In the end, Kant is perhaps primarily concerned with preserving the idea of a universal beauty; that is, he believes deeply (one might say a priori) that a concept of beauty must exist that is not influenced by culture or background or context or emotional state.  Kant himself asserts that to say that everyone has their own taste “would be as much as to say that there is no taste at all, i.e., no aesthetic judgment that could make a rightful claim to the assent of everyone” (419-420). Kant wants to preserve this idea of a "rightful claim," and he goes to great lengths to do so.  

Kant even seems to recognize at times that his theory has severe limitations. These are most notable where Kant seems to allow himself a step outside his a priori assumptions in order to justify them in some way. While Kant insists upon the "universality" of an object's beauty, he admits that, when a claim to the beautiful is made:

"One wants to submit the object to his own eyes, just as if his satisfaction depended on sensation; and yet, if one then calls the object beautiful, one believes oneself to have a universal voice, and lays claim to the consent of everyone" (420).

The entire communicative value of beauty seems lost in this sentence.  What good is a claim to aesthetic which must constantly be double-checked.  Furthermore, what is suggested but notably left unsaid is the question of what happens when, having submitted what you call beautiful to my eye, I decide that it is, in fact, quite ugly? Which of us has poor taste, and what implications does this have if what you have shown me is an exemplar? If you were the one tasked with training me in Taste, you have either utterly failed (either because of the inadequacy of your system, or the inferiority of my mind) or you must demand that it is I who have poor taste.  Either option seems to imply some degree of interest.

Despite his insistence on avoiding rules or standards for art, Kant (accidentally?) includes some clues as to his own conception of the beautiful.  He includes examples of architecture (a home, a palace), animal and plant life (a flower, a Bird of Paradise, "certain sea animals"), visual art (the drawing) and even (in spite of his later insistence on the distinction between art and handicraft) certain textiles ("the garment").  To me, these few examples in themselves suggest a certain political understanding of what qualifies for beauty, perhaps more tellingly by what they leave out than by what they include.  For example, what is it about a Bird of Paradise or a flower that makes them beautiful that would not also qualify the vulture and the thistle? what aura of "purposiveness" exists for the former but not for the latter?  Likewise, the suggesting that "certain sea creatures" would be considered beautiful implies in its very phrasing the idea that other sea creatures exist, and are excluded from qualification.  Even the choice of "home" and "garment" over other forms of architecture and textile-craft suggest a certain quality of what is comforting, what Kant might call "charm." This implication brings with it the entire realm of cultural determinants which Kant seems so eager to do away with.

By his insistence that beauty live up to his high expectations for the Pure human mind, Kant empties the concept of any definitive value whatsoever, leaving the concept of beauty to designate such cliche objects as flowers and palaces.  If those things that are beautiful are simply those things which attain to some veiled trope of what might be called elegance of form, one might ask, who cares about beauty?