On Aesthetic Theory

Aesthetic theories seem to fail insofar as they forgo their obligation to accept themselves as subjective. Kant seems least to attempt to disguise this fact. Judgment as a word retains its true subjective uncertainty. As used in court (and at court, perhaps?) to judge is to weigh the basic facts and come to some conclusion, a conclusion which context gives the weight of some specific set of ethical standards. But if aesthetic judgment is to avoid populism (as it ever seems so determined to do), it must take on a belief in some true standard of objectivity while simultaneously and steadfastly refusing to subject its conclusions to testing.

Kant exposes this. He knows that no matter what conclusion is drawn by another regarding beauty, we are always inclined to a personal experience. The desire to test for ourselves. In this way, social conceptions of beauty, which characterize much of the interest in popular culture, act as aesthetic conduits. And so any totalizing aesthetic theory acts as nothing less or more, in any logical sense, than a preference for the movies of François Truffaut over those of Jean-Claude Vann Damme. It seems to me, then, that the denigration of the opposite opinion must necessarily be based on ethical grounds. According, that is, to some idea of the 'right' or 'just' way, to some act of judgment. To do so in the name of aesthetic theory, then, looks like just the type of political aestheticism which Benjamin warns us so vehemently against. From here my concern regarding Adorno arises. By drawing such a large part of human artistic production under a single net, and then condemning it outright, Adorno draws a most personal line between himself and any concept of mass. Mass is the medium with which Benjamin (and Marx) were so fascinated. Mass is the medium of the revolution, and yet for Adorno, the masses have been massively mislead, and his aesthetic theory attempts single-handedly to 'right' their course. I am lead by Benjamin to suspect such a presumption. For Benjamin, the masses which arose as a result of the industrial revolution will necessarily lead to their redemption. He mostly avoids any attempt to make judgments regarding the objects of consumption, except to acknowledge them as significant, and to acknowledge in technological change an infinite capacity to shock us. His love for movies stems for their capability to appropriate masses. He understands that mass reaction contains something qualitatively different than that found in individual contemplation. He may well lament the relative scarcity of human contemplation (many like him still exist, Adorno), but he understood the potential for change to reside not in an individual understanding, but as the result of mass (re)action.

Adorno's aesthetic, because it positions itself in opposition to the entire realm of popular arts, because it qualifies every potential artwork in relationship to its status as a commodity, leaves literally no object to judge but the viewers own mind. We might justify this in the music industry by some concept of 'selling out.' Such and such a band were so dope, man, until they sold out. Now they just make music for the masses. But not only does this justification seem to suggest its own two-dimensional quality, it also does not help us with regards to other artists, nor in the ever-growing complexity of other media. For example, what do we make of a film which gets maid by a major motion picture company, under a descent but not unreasonable budget, for an all but non-existent audience. If the film is sophisticated (say for example, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), it might merit Adorno's classification as art. Here it is, it has navigated (as it must) the evil, collusive complex of the culture industry, and it has retained some aspect of its resistance to commodification. It represents itself as a hero to the cause of the worker. It represents itself as art by denying itself. So far so good; until such a movie gains a wider audience. Friends tell friends, and in true Gladwellian style, the fashion tips, and suddenly everyone is watching it. Now the film seems to defy the nature of Adorno's aesthetic. It seems that it is not nearly so difficult as everyone supposed, and so perhaps does not resist in the way that we thought it might it's own easy consumption by the masses. What are we to make of this? Adorno's aesthetic again seems reduced to no more than some petty and conflicted notion of 'selling out'.

This tendency is seen on a broader (read: more massive) scale in the social tendency to deny the quality of a film that has been made based on a favorite book. While there my be a relatively small number of people who lament the fall of literature from Franz Kafka to Dan Brown, there are many more who might lament the shift from page to film for works such as The Lord of the Rings (or even more democratically, for Harry Potter). Here we have a much broader group of people making what is ostensibly the same judgment that Adorno makes, but in order to distinguish between a group of aesthetic objects all of which might be classified by him as pure commodity. I can hardly see Adorno granting Harry Potter the status of art object. (If he might perhaps for Sorcerer's Stone, than certainly not by the release of The Chamber of Secrets--obvious as the product of an industrial complex.) However, someone who decries the movie versions of these books invariably does so by recourse to some notion of difficulty as related to mass appeal. It doesn't allow for your imagination. It changed some of the best parts. The movie just got Voldemort all wrong. A fan of the book pre-film-adaptation qualifies himself as such through his reaction to the film as much as through his reaction to the book. To say nothing of the millions of new readers who flock to the book as a result of the movie. Adorno may well point to the conspiracy between J. K. Rowling, Scholastic, and Warner Brothers, it would be harder to explain away had the original book qualified for him as art. Suddenly, with a million new readers and a revived printing cycle, the book doesn't seem so steadfastly to refuse its commodity status.

Equally relevant to this problem might be the Oprah effect, which, while initially reserving for itself books that might fall well short of Adorno's critical gaze, more recently has adopted some titles which before might have found their way onto his list (2005: The Sound and the Fury; 2007: The Road, Love in the Time of Cholera). Adorno might only explain this extreme commodification by making some claim to his own 'correct' reading of the texts, as opposed to the message of subjugation which is inevitably inscribed upon the texts by the culture industry. But to do so is either to call into question any immanent critique which may have lay dormant in the work while it was still difficult and unpopular--while it still seemed to resist its own commodification--or to admit Oprah Winfrey (the culture industry might find no one better qualified for its own embodiment) as a potential disseminator of objects of true aesthetic quality. Either of these options seems to undermine Adorno's entire point of view.

Benjamin celebrates the transition from the primacy of the page to the seduction of the screen, not because he understands film to be in any way a better medium (I think he still might hold the opposite opinion), but because he understands in the transition to mass-media an entire revolution in the patterns of human thought. He glimpses the fact that, in a mass-media environment, recourse to any single medium, or the patterns of thought required in the processing of single media (of which he mentions contemplation) might seem antiquated, quaint, and tirelessly ideological.

This is the trap into which Adorno seems to fall. He fails to recognize, to inhabit, the shift in consciousness which is afforded--insisted upon--by the advent of mass-media. He insists upon a hierarchy of art which is grounded equally--and no more innocently--in ritual and its power structures as is the body of work which he casts aside with a grimace by employing his epithet, "the culture industry." And so he comes across sounding like a crotchety grandpa lamenting the music of 'kids these days!', with no more grounding for his disparagement of Weezer than they have in their distaste for Glen Miller.

However, I find myself to be sympathetic to Adorno, if only because I perceive as well as he the capacity for Capitalism to produce ever larger amounts of self-fulfilling, self-actualizing, internally-promotional bullshit. I might even be inclined to associate my own ethical views with his, had they not lead him to so undemocratic a conclusion. As an attempt to recuperate what seems useful in Adorno's theory, it might prove fruitful to consider artwork in general, even (perhaps especially) that class of artwork which seems most conducive to consumption, as containing within it something akin to Adorno's immanent critique. This, to me, seems more dialectical: to wonder how a multi-million dollar blockbuster might contain within it the suggestion of its own denial. To tease out the ways that Spiderman 2 expresses a refusal to allow an identity between the universal and the particular, and especially the ways that it does this without recourse to pre-mass patterns of thought, through a Benjaminian reception in distraction. Capitalism, according to Marx, contains within it the seeds of its own destruction. If we take him at his word, it seems unlikely that these seeds would not be germinating in the symbol-rich soil of the culture industry.

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?

It Won't Happen To Me

Yesterday, the high school hosted its annual pre-prom Don't Drink and Drive program for the student body. Last year's program was a refreshing change of pace: the usual scared-straight videos and parent-style lecture was replaced by a heartfelt discussion by a young man who had been paralyzed by a drunk driver, aided (because he could not, in fact, speak) by his loving mother.

This year, no such luck. Bill Richardson, a former Gwinnett County police officer, came to give his presentation about, purportedly, teens and alcohol and driving. The presentation is part of Mr. Richardson's It Won't Happen To Me campaign to reduce the number of teen deaths resulting from car accidents. (Reported accurately by Bill as "the leading cause of death among teens today".) The program was mostly what you might expect: Bill spent a long time lecturing the kids things they should already know. A lot of dontdothises and dontdothats intermingled with graphic video clips of some real car accident tragedies and even more reenacted car accident tragedies.

The worst of these videos can be seen below. It should be noted that the students had seen before during an entirely separate "don't text and drive" program delivered as part of our school-wide Advisement program.



A couple of things stand out to me about this program, and this video in particular.

First of all, don't we all know by now that Scared Straight doesn't work? Taking young toughs to the jailhouse in the hopes of frightening them away from crime forever only ends up teaching them new and more troublesome ways to look and act tough. Likewise, when the students see tragedy in a movie, they are inclined to think of it as just that: a movie. It is clear from the first moments of the above film that it is a reenactment -- a fiction. We are conditioned to percieve this distinction, even when it does not exist: on the big screen, even true events seem "unreal." It seems like creating this sort of separation between viewer and event makes more, not less, likely an attitude of indifference or insusceptibility.

That it doesn't work, to me, seems a good thing, and we should immediately turn to different methods. This sort of pathetic appeal (pun intended) is precisely the argumentative style we should be teaching kids to recognize and reject. If we learn anything from the current state of world politics, it must be that fleeting, gut-reaction emotional response should be -- indeed, must be -- no basis for the formation of opinions and plans of action. In fact, it seems like this sort of emotional conditioning might very well lead to an increase in poor decision making. If I base my negative reaction to drunk driving on my gut reaction while viewing a disturbing video, I may just as likely base my positive reaction to drunk driving on my gut reaction while totally wasted and trying to impress a girl or seem tough or save face.

Furthermore, if your intention is to persuade kids not to drink and drive, it is advisable to stay on message. Pick your battles. This program is given 3 days before prom for a reason. Mr. Richardson lost sight of the immediate goal, and a lot of his time (and mine -- this was during my planning period) could have been saved if someone had simply told him that the texting thing had been done. That what we are really worried about is drinking. Prom is right around the corner, after all.

But Bill didn't stop there. And this is what really gets me. At some point he made the leap to eating and driving, as well. He implored the students not to eat their chicken biscuits behind the wheel.

This all reminds me of the numerous Don't Do Drugs programs that I experienced as a child. Aside from the failed reasoning behind a "just say no" philosophy (an issue I explore in some depth in an earlier post), drug use prevention programs always take one too many steps. As a child, I am with you for don't do heroin, don't do cocaine, don't do marijuana -- especially if you show me some scary pictures or bring in a convict to prove the dangers. Adding cigarettes and alcohol to the mix, though, starts to muddy the waters. After all, my dad drinks alcohol. My grandfather smokes. What gives?

The program they gave my fifth grade year also went further: caffeine is a drug.

This sort of divergence from a central theme seems to risk a complete loss of effectiveness. After all, once a Georgia-born, Coca-Cola-raised raised fifth grader hears you say that he shouldn't drink caffeine, you are finished. He no longer hears a word you say, and there is a good chance that whatever you said before has also been tossed out. You have become an unreliable source. Your credibility is shot.

Ever thus to Bill and his chicken biscuits.

The real reason for this post, though, is less a polemic than a curiosity.

You see, Bill Richardson started his program by saying, "we all have said 'It won't happen to me' before, and it's important to remember that it can happen to you." Which got me thinking: nobody ever says "It won't happen to me." In fact, the very idea of anyone saying such strikes me immediately as ridiculous.

A discussion which uses "It Won't Happen To Me" as its jumping-off point surrounds nearly every great social ill of the last 20 years. Alcohol and drug addiction, domestic violence, AIDS, even diabetes: all seem at least in part to be caused by some uninformed person saying "It Won't Happen To Me" just before partaking in some ill-advised risk behavior which leads to their inevitable ruin. The following hypothetical conversations illustrate the point:

TODD (Slamming his 14th brewski): Well, I'm bored of this party. I'm leaving. Anybody need a ride?
SUE (Concerned): Todd, you're drunk! Don't you know that driving under the influence is the leading cause of death in teens?
TODD (Climbing into his hatchback): Yeah, but it won't happen to me.

TODD (Flexing his biceps): Well, it's Friday. I am going out to have anonymous unprotected sex with multiple partners.
STU: (Stepping from the kitchen): Todd, be careful. AIDS can affect anyone. If you are going to choose to have sex out of wedlock, you should really wear a condom.
TODD (Checking his high-top fade in the mirror): Nah. It won't happen to me.

Now, I understand what these activists are aiming at when they use "It Won't Happen To Me" to start their spiel. They are not referring to an actual spoken phrase, but are rather making reference to an assumed mindset that we share before we make decisions which are statistically inadvisable. They hope that by facing the mindset beforehand we can avoid it when faced with a real situation. As I said with regards to D.A.R.E., context-free, all-or-nothing social practice is at least pointless and ineffective, at worst damaging in itself. We cannot hope -- nor should we -- that something as complex and nuanced as peer group sociology and adolescent psychology can be reduced to a set of predesignated rules and regulations. To do so is at once irresponsible and unimaginative.

"It Won't Happen To Me" is a false construct. It doesn't actually exist, in our minds or elsewhere, when we are in the midst of making a crucial decision. Or, if it does exist, it is a spontaneous generation of our psyche which likely gets much more positive reinforcement than negative. When we get in the car, even entirely sober, and face the chance of being hit by another driver. When we place our money in the bank, despite the fact that banks can collapse. When we get our hair died, knowing that many dye-jobs turn out just horribly. When we squeeze again into our skinny jeans and confront the risk of an embarrassing rip. In each of these situations, undoubtedly, we must also say to ourselves, "It Won't Happen To Me." And inevitably, more often than not, we are right.