Sociology versus Aesthetics, or, the Fallacy of Consensus

In all of my blog posts over the years my sole concern has been aesthetics, especially as distinct from sociology. I should also add that when I use the word aesthetic I contend for it to include what ordinarily  is considered "spiritual". Humans make works of art but they do not do so as they please and they do not simply get hit with so many objects that fall from the sky ready made. Such objects have to be built and it is often the most arduous job in the world. It is possible for humans to create essentially artificial objects set apart from what we ordinarily call the real world itself. The very fact that such an object is set apart - bracketed from reality - means that we should never treat it as the same as we would our daily life. A painting of the family next door is still never identical to the family next door. Neither is a photograph. For one thing it is an inanimate object. For another, the very act of making an object for the purposes of reflection should tell us that we are meant to reflect and not directly act.

The trouble of course is that art objects emerge from scenes comprised of a particular sociology. Though the sociology is essential to their creation it is always the least important part of that creation. To think otherwise is to commit to the fallacy of consensus. The assumption is that there is a single or singular reality to which a work must conform or pay allegiance. This is one of the ways we are in the grip of  the myth of consensus (actually fallacy is the better term since there is some deepest truth in all myth - along, of course, with some falsehood).

Consensus says that we have to somehow come together on a set of issues and if we fail to come together then we are doomed to some kind of tragic societal or existential death. One can be forgiven for buying into this fallacy in the case of climate change where how we act, or not act, in the world might involve that kind of destruction.

But it is sheer madness to have this desire for consensus in all  or even many areas of life. Humans are not chiefly consensual creatures for we happen to come in the form of singular embodied individuals.  We do cooperate in the interest of survival, but our cooperative impulses are (thankfully!) thwarted at every turn by the force of individual personalities, the presence of which is regretted by mystics suspicious of the human ego, but the absence of which would mean a dehumanization that would spell a death in life, even if sold as some kind of transcendence. In speaking against cooperation in this way I don't mean to sound terrible. And I realize the force of some individual personalities can be a force for evil. But I am saying we should at least honor that fact that we have individual personalities and are not as of yet simply carbon copies of one another.  Our choices are not between cooperation and competition. Our choices are between choosing a life in which our individuality is honored (which doesn't have to require competition) or a life in which only our identify as part of some larger group is what is honored.

Consensus is very bad for the arts. Every time a consensus has been enforced in the history of art, aside from the fact that the majority of the work in a single period has a sameness about it when viewed by future audiences, the result has been that superior work that doesn't exactly match the consensual style always gets ignored, if it is not destroyed outright. If it does survive, the formerly rejected work, upon reexamination many years later, now always seems to be reassigned the highest value. Upon such reconsideration people wonder aloud with an apparently sincere tone of regret how they could have been so wrong in the first place. The reason this happens is that in the sociological milieu of the work's original debut all anybody cared about was the work's correspondence to the consensus of the time. They did not care about more eternal values like curiosity, pleasure, or emotional and intellectual interest. The need for consensus will cause people to pan work that should have been praised and vice versa.  (The same phenomenon can also cause work to be praised merely because it is in the dominant style of a period, when, upon disinterested examination, the work can be found to be not particularly valuable).

This is the only explanation for why Friedkin's masterpiece Cruising, to name but one of a great many examples - Ishttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishtar_(film)htar is another, as is Zabriskie Point - could have suffered it's original fate.

What happened in the reception of Cruising is that the consensus that held sway was whatever the male gay community at the time felt about that particular movie, and they imposed this consensus not only on their own viewing of the picture, (if they bothered to view it), but ultimately on how the rest of the world had to view it. Worst of all, they attempted to disrupt the film production itself by protesting the shoot and creating loud noises intending to destroy takes, in hopes that it would never have the opportunity to become a final film. Before a proper evaluation was even possible the very idea of the thing was an affront to their consensus; proof or evidence was quite beside the point. Thus, a highly intelligent investigation into the nature of sex and violence and, yes, gender in the narrative, cinematic form of a police procedural was mistakenly viewed as some kind of homophobic, horror/slasher picture.


This can happen in any art medium. In my own field of music a good example of an oppressive consensus was the wholesale rejection of certain kinds of tonal harmony in composition. For music to be considered relevant and therefore good, it had to use non-tonal elements or at the very least elements sufficiently dissonant so that they defied any associations with tonal implications. The plethora of bad serial or row music was but one result of that consensus. Bust as you can see here in this moment from a Leonard Bernstein lecture, not all of the leading figures in an artistic "scene" will be certain to agree as Bernstein here makes a case for a a certain tonal sense. 


In a very real sense when it comes to how we evaluate any new work, we have all become like the detractors of Cruising when it originally came out. We are always vigilant and mindful of the threat that an artwork might challenge a consensus. We praise works that flatter the consensus in our heads and condemn works that inconvenience it, or even contradict it. What this means is, among other things, however exciting and relevant a work of art may be for us for today, it might lose such excitement and relevance for people in a certain future. This is a far greater sense of discontinuity than for a thing to be merely "dated." The reason for this is that we interpret aesthetic objects - that which is intended for aesthetic meaning and purposes - in moral/sociological ways. But to do this is to abandon the aesthetic sense altogether, an abandonment we will be the poorer for, whether we are consciously aware of this loss or not.

Lessons from the 70s: the Bicentennial: A Seventies journey via youtube

For the past forty odd years since 1976 we have lived in the most dramatic of times. The other superpower and empire fell, we've had the rise (and takeover) of the internet (which I needn't remind the reader is as revolutionary as Gutenberg's printing press), the Reagan revolution, the terrorism of September 11, our current economic collapse with the housing and banking crises, and much more.

When we think of recent US presidents, though they are widely divergent in sensibilities and politics, one thing they have in common is that they do not generally arouse indifference. Reagan, Bush the Second, (Bush the First seems to me an anomaly-almost a throwback to the fifties and sixties), Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama are all people that tend towards the charismatic, arousing passions from all sides, the strongest hatred and love, a kind of celebrity consciousness, and all of them analyzed in millions of volumes, whether on paper or on line. Whatever you might think of that lot of men, they proclaim their own seriousness and that the times in which they reign as serious - as uniquely important and special in some way. Whether it is climate change or Al Queda, an air of heaviness weighs upon the shoulders of Americans, like the ghosts of so many wars past.

The seventies is in part so interesting to me because of its inability to be that serious.

Whatever you might think about these United States and world leaders none of them is anything like Jerry Ford who was the president in 1976:

Notice his dry, completely unexciting and anti-charismatic midwestern Michigan delivery. This is a man who was an accidental president, who did not want to be president, but was nevertheless forced to be president, dragged kicking and screaming into a thankless job. He was a national substitute teacher: all owing to the disgrace and failure of his predecessor.

I have often described the 1970s as a time of contradictions. In many respects it was an earnest, on the nose time. But in other ways it was a time that went out of its way to be undramatic and unexciting. It saw lack of pretensions as a badge of honor. I am only too happy that our nation was founded in 1776 and not, say 1756, or 1766. I get a real relish, perverse perhaps, when I think of our bicentennial, that it occurred during a time of rather mediocre synthetic clothing and a president who was neither left wing nor right wing, liked golf and football more than the arts and was accident prone.

How I long for Republicans like Jerry Ford. So anti-ideological. Our current Republicans are so extreme in their views, they make pronouncements against masturbation in public, have anti-liberal and anti- democratic (or hyper-democratic) beliefs, and peddle a cheap religiosity, or belong to dubious religious denominations.

I am currently reading Jimmy Carter's White House diaries. Two things that strike me about it are Carter's enormous sensitivity and intelligence, both in his distrust of extremism and fanaticism of all kinds, and the great difficulties he experienced with increasing dogmatic partisanship, in bringing diverse interest groups together. In these matters he is rather like our current president Obama. But many people hated Carter in his time, though Carter was very much a man of the moment, going out of his way to exalt casualness and relaxation. Though he had the Iran hostage crisis with which to deal in public, in private Carter had an oddly eccentric Southern family. His brother Billy had a mediocre beer named after him, after all.

I need not note that Carter was marked by a most extraordinary lack of chemistry and charisma, perhaps not as flat as Ford, but still charisma-proof nevertheless. I feel economic troubles and the Iranian crisis may have insured the election of Ronald Reagan. But Reagan begins the new age of earnestness. In his own way Ronald Reagan - that conservative and decidedly "old fashioned"and square opponent of all things that smacked of the counterculture - was more earnest than any anti-war folk singer from fifteen years earlier. Think of him exhorting to Gorbachev: "tear down that wall!" We have been suffering from a kind of hypertropic hyperbole ever since.

But maybe the earnestness really begins with Jimmy Carter.

Jimmy Carter gave an address that is probably one of the wildest addresses any U.S. president has ever given. Obama is more of the eloquent poet and a noted intellect, really a Formalist but Carter was the wildest Romantic. That address by Carter has a truly seventies wildness to it that cannot be duplicated today. At once "touchy feely" and intellectual he sounds more like a psychotherapist at a couples retreat, and like a lecturer in ecology in philosophy department at a state college than an American president. At times he sounds like Werner Erhard!

Everything he says in that address applies more today than at the time it was delivered, with talk now of flooded cities in the future, polar ice caps melting, and above all, peak oil. Indeed Carter's was an address in which the content was and is all true. He said then that we had been putting off the environmental problems for too long. Yet that was thirty years ago. He was a wild Jeremiah, a prophet. Yet the scientific credentials were sound. I love how he talks about "the meaning of our lives" and lists the complaints and comments of regular folks in letters to the White House. This is a transitional speech, full of the enormous seriousness to come, but full of the risk-taking, playful adventuresome of that period.

(Some would argue that the pop cultural embrace of a cheapened irony - David Letterman - contradicts my charge of earnestness, but in fact the need to resort to such a mode of playfulness seems forced: an obvious reaction to having to live in such evidently self important times. By contrast, the 1970s took each day at a time and saw what would happen if we just winged it. The eighties was a counterfeit version of such casualness.)

Let us do a close reading of television coverage: notice this introduction to the coverage of our nation's bicentennial with Harry Reasoner.

Notice the visuals and music for the introduction. There is the use of a kind of funky blues riff, with unison string writing, and the patriotic drumbeats are made to sound like an approximation of music meant to represent Native Americans in a second rate Republic pictures Western. The singers chant "Happy Birthday Uncle Sam" in an unenthusiastic and sad monotone. The music is kind of astonishing, its net effect more like background arranging studio orchestra figures from a disco song, but maybe not as trippy as the long, vast streams of red white and blue stripes and Harry Reasoner's wide lapelled baby blue sports jacket and almost clownish, wide red necktie.

Reasoner's delivery is noticeably unexcited, a mode I have been emphasizing all along. He is a little wry but there is something unusually relaxed about all of it. Though he looks stiff because of the tightness of men's design in suiting and jacketing in that period, at the same time he appears relaxed, befitting a time dedicated to oxymoron.

You have to wonder about a world that would create something like that.

Here is a local news observation and report on July 4th 1976, in Miami. I need not comment on the raiment represented therein, to say nothing of the design of the news studio.

You have to wonder again about sartorial matters. What kind of world would create necktie knots that appear to be the size of some children's heads, and coat lapels that take up the entire space of the chest. The sheer outrage of such disproportionate design will tell you that this was no ordinary time indeed. There is air of the clown in it, stagflation and energy crisis or not.

Style is the of the essence. The manner is the matter. If you examine these modes over time as an artist might examine a great painting or poem, you will learn much more about what is going on in the fullness of time than you ever will by reading, say, some book by David Halberstam.

Happy Birthday "America".