Art, aesthetics, and the new individualism

The above-mentioned development in philosophy is not something that occurred independent of other aspects of life. Similar developments toward dichotomies between subject and object, individual and social, as well as mind and body can be found in art and aesthetics³⁹⁷. As Levin and Taylor have argued, the disembodied punctual or subjective self is interesting not only as a philosophical construction, but because it is lived through in western culture in general. Aesthetics—simultaneously as it widened out from literature to study music amongst the other arts—did not originate individualistic ideas but helped to articulate the general cultural change.³⁹⁸ Paradoxically, as Dewey posed the question of art in terms of ‘experience’, Wolterstorff argues that the Cartesian-Kantian tradition in aesthetics did the same.

However, unlike Dewey, the Cartesian tradition in aesthetics represented “man as centre of consciousness rather than man as agent in the world”³⁹⁹. Action as a matter of causation was therefore separated from experience and therewith practice from the aesthetic. Another perspective that modern aesthetics established was the focus on the artistic creation instead of the uses of art. According to Wolterstorff, there is a widespread reliance that “in artistic creation man transcends the routines of ordinary social existence, transcends also the use of works of art for the performance of various actions, and experiences something of higher values”⁴⁰⁰. Arts—including music—

were characterized by being the special activities of professionals and genius. When the focus was transferred from its social functions, music became one of the fi ne-arts.⁴⁰¹ Aesthetics in this form seems to be in line with the conception of the modern self, a self who is free from the social and the bodily, and who uses her inner powers

397 There is no one use or defi nition for the aesthetic. The term ‘aesthetic’ comes from Greek aisthetikos that referred to perception and was introduced into philosophical use in the modern sense in the 18^th century by Baumgarten. The understanding of the content of the aesthetic has, however, changed depending on the philosophical stance.

398 Levin 1988, 96; Taylor 1989, 285.

399 Wolterstorff 1980, x.

400 Ibid.

401 Also Kristeller 1992, 33-34; Elliott 1995, 22.

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to transcend toward the universal and to the realm of spirit where objects of art exist.

Compared to the Cartesian version, Kant seems to bring art closer to the sensing human being. However, even in his version, the inward subjectivity that seeks for aesthetic pleasure is universal instead of a fl esh-and-blood social being. Bowman explains that in the Kantian stance, the criteria for judgment of the conceptless and universal aesthetic quality is disinterested. Aesthetic criteria are different from rational judgments that are always interested; they are not knowledge. Beauty pleases subjectively and universally but not objectively. Kant made a distinction between social agreeableness and aesthetic pleasure relating agreeable experience to the biological animal side of contingent pleasures. Agreeable experience is a private affair that involves “no cognition of the object”⁴⁰² whereas beauty transcends such contingent pleasure.⁴⁰³ In aesthetic pleasure, the human creative imagination joins understanding so that the particular subjective pleasure exemplifi es the universally shared processes of consciousness. Aesthetic pleasure is a purely aesthetic one, autonomous and subjectively universal.⁴⁰⁴ Subsequently, aesthetic beauty is not a sensation or a concept but “grounded on its own distinct kind of feeling”⁴⁰⁵.

According to Kant’s stance, art gains its aesthetic autonomy and freedom from the conceptual world since it has been “ruled” by genius. Genius presents its own particular rules in an artistic product. His or her imagination takes what is given to it and creates from natural materials aesthetic ideas or images, something new that transcends material conditions.⁴⁰⁶ When the creation of genius is judged aesthetically, the judgment is universal so that the estimator demands other people to agree with the judgment. Taste is a sign of the capability to make aesthetic judgments and to estimate the applicability of one’s own feeling.

Kant’s ideas have been important in building up the image of an autonomous creative individual. However, the Kantian self is problematic in terms of cultural differences.

If music is universally pleasing and not socially agreeable, there cannot be any real cultural differences in art as experience but, rather, only aesthetic and non-aesthetic musical objects. Since non-aesthetic beauty is its own distinct kind of feeling, it

402 Bowman (1998) cites Kant’s The Critique of Judgement § 3, 45 (ibid., 79).

403 Ibid.

404 See also, ibid., 81-82.

405 Ibid., 83, my italics.

406 Ibid., 83-84.

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separates music as aesthetic from its possible functions and practical connections. The distinction between aesthetic and non-aesthetic either reduces some particular aspect of music or classifi es most music in the world into the category of non-aesthetic objects. Of importance from the viewpoint of music education is that aesthetic production is reserved for the exceptional and the genius. Aesthetic education gains a clear target in its desire to make the students understand the world of the geniuses.

Hence, there is a general tendency in the western tradition of aesthetics to make distinctions toward the transcendental, to search for the transcendental in contrast to the ordinary⁴⁰⁷. Goehr presents a list of dualisms that have distanced art and art music from the ordinary world, action and the social and political contingent of mundane life. These dualisms can be seen as further derivations from the general distinctions between the subject and object, the mind and body, or the individual and social illustrating in more detail the kind of manifestations that dualistic thinking can have in musical life. In Goehr’s list the transcendental is truth, knowledge, civilized, culture, thought, contemplation, controlled, separation, distance, independence, beyond, abstract, self-expression, individuality, pure, clean, useless, functionless, non-practical, disinterested, high, art, music for music’s sake, and so on. The other side of these dualisms includes the ordinary: belief, opinion, base, animalistic, behaviour, feelings, participation, instinctual, uncontrolled, the real world, involvement, within, concrete, compromise, conformity, “dirty hands”, useful, functional, practical, interested, empirical, low, craft, music for the people (Figure 2).⁴⁰⁸ The western view instructs us that both music as art and philosophy should search for the transcendental. Music is not only against the world but also not of the world⁴⁰⁹. Goehr argues that in this process instrumental music, while lacking concrete content, was lifted higher in order to act as an embodiment of transcendent truth. It did not just point to otherworldliness but embodied it.⁴¹⁰ The value of music is seen in so-called Apollonian performances, which do not affect or even remind us of the pleasures of the fl esh. Music then gains its prestige or its very essence of being art by not having a material nexus, by its ability to transcend everyday life.

407 Goehr 1992 & 1994.

408 Goehr 1994, 103.

409 Ibid.

410 Goehr 1992, 154-155

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FIGURE 2. Normative dualisms of the transcendental and ordinary in art and life.

The question of transcending everyday life seems not be this simple, however.

According to Taylor, the new individualism and subjectivism did affi rm ordinary life but in the framework of effi cient control of, and dedication to, one’s individual life, valuing the detachment from purely personal enjoyments. According to Taylor, within the modern framework,

[o]ur goal must be to subordinate the passions to their proper functions. But we come to understand what these are purely through disengaging reason. The lived experience of the passions teaches us nothing; it can only mislead. Our passions should in the end function only as cold disengaged understanding shows us they ought to.⁴¹¹

Since passions did not belong to a stable society or to a decent personal life, normative logic insists that by controlling music one is able to control one’s passions and by this to fi nally regulate social forces⁴¹².

Goehr calls this process of detachment in art the separability principle⁴¹³. Due to the “separability principle” art became a matter of individual inward experience and provided what Shusterman calls “a dangerous escape into interiority and individualist

411 Taylor 1989, 283.

412 See also, Sarjala 2001, 28.

413 Goehr 1992, 157.

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isolation”⁴¹⁴. Aesthetic experience became an atomistic sensation. It became “the island of freedom, beauty and idealistic meaning in an otherwise coldly materialistic and law-determined world”⁴¹⁵.

Consequently, as Small writes, in western concert-halls and opera houses the framing and setting techniques concretely controlled the escape into interiority. Everyday life was separated by small rituals such as the purchase of tickets, the reserving of seats, the conventions of dress and behaviour for both performers and audience. The period of time spent with musical performance became more steadily defi ned than in most folk traditions. The conventions of behaviour emphasize the private moment that the musical performance offers and the separateness of the musical object from daily life.⁴¹⁶ Small describes:

We are left in no possible doubt of the temporal extent of the musical work, no doubt of when is the music and when not. The care taken to delineate clearly the boundary of the art work is not a chance phenomenon, but a sign of the special, isolated position of art in post-Renaissance Europe.⁴¹⁷

According to Mercer, the body that in Goehr’s list can be linked to ordinary and animalistic participation has been a key discriminator in the reception of a hegemonic culture of modernity. Mercer argues:

Nothing more radically distinguishes popular spectacles – – from bourgeois spectacles, than the form of participation of the public. For the former, whistles, shouts, pitch invasion are characteristic, for the latter the gestures are distant, heavily ritualized—

applause, obligatory but discontinuous and punctual cries of enthusiasm—‘author, author’ or ‘encore’. Even the clicking of fi ngers and tapping of feet in a jazz audience are only a ‘bourgeois spectacle which mimes a popular one’ since the participation is reduced to ‘the silent allure of the gesture’.⁴¹⁸

The bourgeois economy of the body involves a distance between ‘refl exion’ and corporeal participation⁴¹⁹. What in the time of Mozart was non-attentive listening became if not more concentrated, at least a more controlled and distanced engagement during the 19^th century. This shift in attention was related to a change in the way musicians thought about music, their expectations and ideals about the basic conditions of their practice.

414 Shusterman 2000b, 147.

415 See also, Shusterman 1997b, 29-30.

416 Small 1996, 25-26.

417 Ibid., 26.

418 Mercer 1986, 59. Mercer quotes here from Bourdieu’s La Dictinction.

419 Ibid.

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The difference between modern and traditional society is radical. In the traditional society music is related to rituals and social activities so that people sing in religious rites, move and dance in social contexts and march in public events⁴²⁰. Nevertheless, both the modern and the traditional view result from the ethos of the given context and are, in that sense, ontologically similar. It is clear, for instance, that the human body has always been there even when considered transparent or irrelevant⁴²¹.

Dewey pointed out that the “museum conception of art” that separates art from everyday life did not emerge from isolation: “The factors that have glorifi ed fi ne art by setting it upon a far-off pedestal did not arise within the realm of art nor is their infl uence confi ned to the arts” ⁴²². Hence, a quiet contemplative attitude in concert halls can be seen as a normative orientation in its wider cultural context. Fletcher has argued that aesthetics as a product of Enlightenment “was an attempt to rationalize the concept of Art at a time when it was becoming embarrassingly clear that Art was indeed an elite activity, largely denied to the poorer classes”⁴²³. As art was separated from its social functions as a servant of courts and the church, and was related to the rise in economic and social prominence of the bourgeois class in 19^th century Europe, the new grouping of fi ne-arts helped bring about political freedom in the world.

According to Goehr, this process in which fi ne arts became autonomous, was itself motivated by a political need. Music became an autonomous end in itself serving as a “symbol” or “analogue” of this political good.⁴²⁴ Also Eagleton and Bourdieu refer to the historical genesis of a notion of a pure aesthetic. Eagleton writes that the “ideology of the aesthetic” that separated art from a realm of ordinary cognitive understanding, from its social functions within church, court and state made art free for anybody to appreciate. Like the work of art as defi ned by the discourse of aesthetics, the bourgeois subject is autonomous and self-determining.⁴²⁵ Bourdieu claims that the objection to historicization in aesthetics rests on an unawareness of its own social conditions of possibility:

What is forgotten – – is the historical process through which the social conditions of freedom from ‘external determinations’ get established; that is, the process of establishing the relatively autonomous fi eld of production and with it the realm of pure aesthetics or pure thought whose existence it makes possible.⁴²⁶

420 Kivy 1991, 89.

421 See also, Sarjala 2001, 30.

422 Bourdieu 1993, 266.

423 Fletcher 1987, 38.

424 Goehr 1994, 105. In music education this development has been examined, e.g., by Elliott 1995, 24-25 or Regelski 1998a. See also, Shusterman 2000b

425 Eagleton 1990, 23, also 368. See also, Elliott 1995, 23.

426 Bourdieu 1993, 266.

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The process of dehistorization and detachment in the arts were thus dependent on many sources within the context where art was produced.

To summarize, in modern 19^th century aesthetics, the transcendental relationship with music was purged of what Goehr calls “dirty hands”, craft, participation and passions; the real world, the ordinary, mundane and everyday. Art was reifi ed and, as Willis describes, “cut off from human process”⁴²⁷. Art as ‘art for art’s sake’, as autonomous, conveys that art should not be evaluated by any other but artistic standards and that we appreciate it instead of use it⁴²⁸. Music as inward experience became “purely musical” and was understood on its own terms distinct from the older heterogeneous notion of music as functional and as having so-called extra-musical contents⁴²⁹. Music was framed in what Goehr calls a ‘metaphorical’ museum, in the

“imaginary museum”; in sophisticated thought and strategic action⁴³⁰. Since music lacks concrete material essence and form, framing and staging, as Small points out, became important in order to mark the status. Even the physical setting of music was arranged appropriately so that all “extra-musical activities” were cut off from the performance⁴³¹. As in the Kantian thinking, music as art was “most itself” when it was

“least other things”⁴³².

This account of the complex developments has tried to illustrate how individualism through Descartes and Kant as well as many other modern thinkers treats the individual mind as an end in itself. A Cartesian-Kantian individual cognizes the musical world from his or her solipsistic vertical perspective by controlling the sensing body-mind and by objectifying embodied experience through refl ective consciousness. The disembodied self appreciates aesthetic objects made by genius, objects that transcend the ordinary world. In this setting, the artistic object exists in its autonomous reality and the subjective individual possesses universal cognitive powers to experience its aesthetic beauty subjectively. The ideas of a subject are localized in this autonomous being and nowhere else whereas the social-cultural, material-bodily and changing-contingent has been cut off from the discourse and focus.

427 Willis 2000, 79.

428 Ibid..

429 Goehr 1992, 122.

430 Ibid., 175.

431 Ibid., 236.

432 Bowman 1998, 87.

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The normative view touches on questions of popular versus high music. My argument is therefore challenging a normative high-low distinction, but even more importantly, it is targeting the general normative philosophical framework that is behind the suggested music education. The transparency or instrumentality of the body and movement in the experience of music, and, as one outcome of these, the missing social and cultural context of musical ideas and enjoyment, is of much concern here. Therefore, my aim is not only to suggest implicitly that different kinds of musical experiences should be included in music education but also to show that the basic starting point in describing the experience—or music—might be biased and irrelevant in many cases.

Taylor has further argued that individualism in its subjectivist form emphasizes the human being’s own authentic expression and has therefore found its conformity in artistic creation. Our notion of art has changed into creation, in which the self expresses his or her most authentic features. The self who fi nds him/herself through creative imagination is a creative person and can fi nd his or her own structure for life without the need to socialize into the surrounding world.⁴³³ It may be through this notion that we close the gap between the ordinary mind and the mind of the genius and can claim that every child and student is equally creative. However, this view inherits an ethically unresponsive notion of the self and excludes other people from the process of fi nding individuality as does the Cartesian self. It does not acknowledge, as Taylor argued, how our thinking develops in relation to existing ideas.

In his Music Matters, Elliott analyses how aesthetic theories have infl uenced music education⁴³⁴. As in this historical overview, the danger is to oversimplify and place writers into narrow categories. Music education as aesthetic education is not necessarily repeating aesthetic theories, just as aesthetic theories may not all fall into the dichotomous worldview and ethos that Goehr among others has described. Rather than claiming that “music education as aesthetic education” has taken a wrong track, as Elliott claims, I have tried to understand it in a wider intellectual environment.

It is in this light the reader should approach the following chapters. The argument that I am illustrating there is that despite the fact that Reimer seems to have realized the impossibility of his position over the past 15 years, normative features of the

433 Taylor 1992.

434 Elliott 1995.

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modern conception of the self, the inward, possessive and disembodied self can still be identifi ed in his work.

In document Bridging experience, action, and culture in music education (sivua 102-110)