12.12.12. philosophy at the end of the world

This year's 'Philosophy in the World' lecture will take place a week before the end of the world, on 12.12.12, becoming LUC's first ever 'Philosophy at the end of the World' lecture.  The first two lectures in this series, by Simon Blackburn and then Raymond Geuss, were great successes.  This one also promises to be a special event that LUC will share with our colleagues from the Honours College in Leiden and the wider public of The Hague.  Hence, the special venue in the city centre: the Nieuwspoort.

All are welcome!

Mass Art and the Emotions

In the chapter Mass Art and the Emotions Noël Carroll looks at the how emotions are used in art. However unlike most of the other chapters of the book Carroll seems to forget that the book focuses on mass art specifically and not art in general. For the discussion in the chapter is mostly tied around how art and emotions go together, he doesn’t try too much to distinguish between how emotions work in mass art and how they might work in other forms of art.

Carroll does acknowledge that “mass art will gravitate (ideally) toward appealing to the emotional dispositions that are distributed amongst the largest numbers of people”. He thus says that mass art will generally use more basic emotions, as these are shared by the largest amount of people worldwide, allowing for the biggest possible audience, which is of essential importance to mass art. However Carroll only admits that mass art might make more use of certain sorts of emotions, which are not necessary for other forms of art (I presume here that Carroll would argue that with avant-garde art it is logical that more ‘exclusive’ emotions could be used that are not necessarily recognized and felt by many people in real life). He however does not say that the role of these emotions within the art is different.

I personally however feel that there might be much more relevant differences between mass art and other forms of art when it comes to the use of emotions. It seems logical indeed to conclude that mass art will generally use more basic emotions since these will be most accessible to the largest possible group. However I do think that there is a clear difference as well between mass art and other forms of art in the reason why emotions are used in the first place in that specific piece of art. As I do not believe that, like Carroll wants us to believe, emotions are used in all art forms to focus our attention. I do that Carroll is right in saying that emotions are used in mass art for that very reason; however with especially avant-garde art I do not think that emotions are always used in as a way to focus people’s attention. Especially because some artists do not wish to focus people’s attention at all, they do not want to make it too easy for their audience to step in and understand the art, and so emotions are used in a much more complex way.

For example if we look at the movie A Serious Man by the Coen Brothers it seems the intention of the directors to make the movie focus on normal emotions with a ‘normal speed’. As the movie does not race through all sorts of emotions like love, hate, sadness and so on. It builds up very slowly. You thus have to work as an audience to keep your attention to the movie and the story, instead of that the movie takes you along with a smooth story and a lot of emotions.

This brings me to my second point: I also think that in mass art emotions are used in a much more extreme way. Apart from different sorts of emotions being used, I think we can easily acknowledge that in for example the average romantic comedy we go sky-high with emotions like love,  and within minutes we go way down with emotions like hate, anger and sorrow. The intensity of the emotions in mass art is thus much higher than it will be in general with other forms of art. It is also much higher than the intensity of most people’s emotions in real life. This is not to say that emotions cannot be used in such a way in other forms of art, because there are enough examples of art, that does not qualify as mass art, which uses emotions in a very extreme way, in order to for example shock an audience. What I do mean to say is that these other forms of art might try to provoke one very intense emotion, like hate, but it will not evoke many different extreme emotions. This is what differentiates mass art from other forms of art: it tries in a very short amount of time to take people through many different emotions, in order to keep people interested and focused.

Along with the foregoing arguments I think it is fair to say that with mass art it is expected that the audience all experience the same sort of emotions when they see/experience the same art. When in a movie the hero gets dumped by his girlfriend we are meant to feel sad or sorry for him, and when in the end they do come back together the makers want us to feel happy. However with other works of art the artist might not have envisioned the audience as all having the same emotions with regard to the artwork. The artist might have tried to evoke different emotions in different people, or might not have cared at all about which emotions the artwork would provoke. Thus in general with non-mass art it is much harder to see which emotions people are supposed to feel when experiencing the art.

Of course there might be works of mass art that in reality make people feel differently than the makers were expecting. However I think it is fair to say that in such an instance the makers failed in making a good work of mass art. Since they clearly did not understand what the audience was expecting, or simply did not deliver the quality the audience was expecting. So for example a horror movie with horrible actors might actually make people laugh because it is so badly acted; or in a romantic comedy we might not at all feel sad for the main character getting dumped if the makers have failed to make us feel a connection to the character. However in all these cases it is clear that the makers failed; as it is was not supposed to happen that people would experience those emotions.

Thus I think Carroll could have gone a lot more in depth with the differences with regard to emotions between mass art and other forms of art. As I do believe that there are significant differences. It would have been interesting to see whether if Carroll had focused more on these questions he might have ended up with a different conclusion in general with regard to whether or not mass art can be considered art proper.

By Laura Pierik (Third year student, LUC The Hague)

Morals and Mass Art

In the last Dean’s honors class, we were ‘picking up the trash’ – looking at mass art through a philosophical lens. As I particularly enjoy what is generally considered bad mass art, i.e. guilty pleasures, such as Laguna Beach, Jersey Shore, Justin Bieber, and Twilight, I was really looking forward to this. Unfortunately the book we were reading – Noël Carroll’s A Philosophy of Mass Art – was from before the millennium and thus light years older than these mass art forms (1998), it still provided us with some nice discussion material – any book using both Cheaper by the Dozen and Pride and Prejudice (the 1813 book, not the 2005 Keira Knightley movie) as case studies is worthy of exploration. During the session I led, we considered mass art in its relation to morality, and I will provide you with a few elements of and thoughts about that discussion.

You could argue that Plato started the whole thing when he argued that all art was necessarily morally corrupting because it promoted emotion over reason and portrayed undesirable emotions and behaviors. (Carroll 291-292) And that does not actually seem so distant from today’s commonly heard notion that video games lead to violence, and foul language on television leads to bad attitudes in children. This is the theory of consequentialism: it argues that mass artworks have predictable causal consequences on moral behavior. Consequentialism is supported by the theories of propositionalism and identificationism, which determine how consequentialism operates.

But first, let us just stick with this primary assumption that there are predictable causal consequences. Carroll discredits this theory by suggesting that many media-behavior relations are not that straightforward; for instance although the Power Rangers use violence, this is morally justified in their world, as there is no police they can call that would save the world as properly as they do. He says: “morally inappropriate violence is systematically presented as unattractive by the media,” (Carroll 303) but is that really true? Video games such as Grand Theft Auto, or movies like The Godfather don’t really have ‘right’ moral justifications, or at least not special circumstances like in the Power Rangers. Plus, mass art-makers want to attract an audience and thus use spectacular effects that might make (especially young) people think violence is ‘cool.’ Also, you hardly ever see someone lying in the hospital or having sustained injuries if they are on the ‘good’ side, so even if the violence is morally justified it is hardly realistically portrayed which thus weakens his point that it is typically “repugnant.” And lastly, what do we make of those who go on mass-killing sprees saying they were brought to it by video games or movies… should we assume they misinterpreted the moral justifications of mass art? I was in Denver during the Aurora movie theater shootings, and that killer said he was inspired by the Joker from the Batman series. Indeed, the Joker was considered the unsung hero of The Dark Knight by a lot of press, and mass artworks with complex moral dimensions might not be so easy for the audience to morally comprehend.

Going back to his elaboration of consequentialism, Carroll explains they work through propositionalism and/or identificationism. Propositionalists hold that a mass artwork contains explicit or implicit propositions, often ‘moral maxims.’ It promotes this, encourages its adoption, “perhaps by making it seem attractive.” (Carroll 297) He unfortunately does not elaborate further on this attractiveness, but in our discussion the idea formed that this seems to rely heavily on breaking taboos, either with violence, sex or humor. At some point however, breaking taboos is no longer attractive, either because it is too far from our minds to be conceivably attractive, or because we have become desensitized. These are aspects of portrayed morality that Carroll neglects to discuss, even though they are definitely worth exploration.

Identificationism, then, is the idea that the audience takes on the emotions (and thereby ideas/propositions/morals) of fictional characters. Carroll seems to inflate this idea with becoming identical, because he suggests that identificationists imagine that audiences completely immerse themselves into a character and no longer connect to their own opinions, wanting to behave identically to the character. A much better argument against this theory, which he thankfully also makes, is that any type of mass art usually has multiple characters and that one usually identifies with a specific one, one which is already in line with one’s own morals/norms, showing that there is a selective process or bias.

Having discarded consequentialism, Carroll takes a different approach, and calls it clarificationism. He suggests that we can create a general theory about the connection between mass art and moral education, but he makes this relationship about the testing of our moral powers. He does not believe that mass art, or any art, can teach you a completely new moral, because then you would not understand the artwork. There needs to be significant overlap between your view of the world and that of the creator before you will understand it, because a narrative cannot convey a complete image of the world and the audience must always fill it in partly. Thus, the “author and the audience need to share a common background of beliefs about the world and about human nature, as well as a relatively common emotional stock.” (Carroll 322)

And it is precisely because the audience needs to fill in part of the story that they can exercise their moral powers: the audience can apply their own morals to the mass artwork to determine what would be the ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ thing to do, thereby being morally educated. This would be a morally good piece of mass artwork. But Carroll suggests that mass art can do even better: it could also “reclassify barely acknowledged moral phenomena afresh … [putting] together previously disconnected belief fragments in a new gestalt way in a way that changes [the audience’s] moral perception.” (Carroll 326) This ‘gestalt switch’ seems quite similar to Marx’ idea of ‘false consciousness’ – Carroll even talks specifically about exploitation for a bit (Carroll 329) – the audience can learn something by linking pieces of the puzzle that were already available to them, but just did not connect yet. This he calls ‘morally good with distinction;’ the mass artwork does more than just allow you to test your moral powers; it encourages you to make a gestalt switch. Thus, “[n]arratives can be morally assessed in terms of whether they contribute to emotional understanding – where that pertains to morality – or whether they obfuscate it.” (Carroll 337)

Unfortunately, Carroll does leave us with a few questions, even after a class discussion:
·      Normatively, is mass art really better if the creator intended for you to have a gestalt switch – is the maker not forcing some moral down your throat? And if the maker did not intend for a piece of art to change you, how does that effect then work – is it all up to the audience?
·      What makes a mass artwork morally bad? Would that be a piece of art so disconnected from any morals that we cannot exercise our moral powers? Or would it be something with morals so disconnected from ours that we cannot understand it and thus not exercise our moral powers?
·      What happens when we have determined a mass artwork to be morally bad, or not allowing for a useful deployment of our moral powers? Should we censor it?
·      What should we think of the self-censorship that creators of mass art apply because they must sell (or somehow promote) their work? Is it really a good thing that we only allow common morals to be present – is there not something to learn from improper morals as well (so long as we know that they are undesirable)?

By Georgina Kuipers (Third year student, LUC The Hague) 

Works Cited:
Noël Carroll. A Philosophy of Mass Art. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.

A not so celebratory account of mass art

Aside from the many philosophical opponents of mass art that Carroll identifies in A Philosophy of Mass Art, he also treats, inter alia, the work of Walter Benjamin, who – according to Carroll – provides a philosophical celebration of mass art. Although Benjamin's essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” is ambiguous in more than one respect, I argue that Carroll cannot effectively maintain that Benjamin's essay is either an account of mass art in Carroll's sense nor that it is a celebration of mechanically reproduced art (in a broader sense).

Benjamin, Carroll argues, employs Hegelian perspectives on mass art that allow him to claim that mass art is a historically specific (new) form of art. Carroll writes that Benjamin defends mass art in two, related, ways: on the one hand, mass art emblematises and exercises a vision that possesses technically emancipatory qualities and because of that contributes to the forces of production and human progress; on the other hand, that the nature of mass art changes with epochal changes in the productive base of society means that mass art, itself a new form of art, cannot be judged by the standards of kinds of art it has historically superseded. Benjamin's first argument is labelled the 'progress' argument by Carroll, the second the 'new art argument.' I challenge one of the premisses of both of these arguments, namely that Benjamin's essay can be interpreted as an account of mass art, and also problematise the 'progressive' or 'celebratory' aspect of Benjamin's theory. Benjamin claims the following: One of the foremost tasks of art has always been the creation of a demand which could be fully satisfied only later. The history of every art form shows critical epochs in which a certain art form aspires to effects which could be fully obtained only with a changed technical standard, that is to say, in a new art form.[1]

 One of the prime functions of art, then, is precisely to develop itself to the extent that technology allows it. Because momentous changes in the technological standards of society – one would presume that Benjamin is thinking here of industrialisation, although he is rather vague in this matter – cause and emblematise the distinctions between historical epochs, art, since its development depends on that of technology, is historically specific. A definition of art in general, one might pose, is that it is the art of its categorical, historical epoch. From a strict reading of Benjamin, it is difficult to discern much with certainty regarding mass art specifically rather than art in general – for Benjamin does not clearly differentiate between different kinds of art within one epoch. It is questionable whether the mass art – avant-garde art dichotomy, specifically in the Carrollian terminology, can be upheld in Benjamin's theory, as Carroll does with his equalling of the terms 'art in the age of mechanical reproduction' and 'mass art' and his identification of avant-garde art in Benjamin's essay. The dichotomy makes no sense if one considers the following phrase: “Dadaism attempted to create by pictorial – and literary – means the effects which the public today seeks in the film.”[2] Carroll identifies Dada as avant-garde art, but precisely what distinguishes avant-garde art from mass art for Carroll, namely that its difficulty designedly restricts it from the masses, becomes problematic when the very ends of it are sought by the general public. Of course, it could be claimed in a Hegelian fashion that mankind's historically expanding consciousness or perception demands increasingly complex art, so that today's avant-garde art is tomorrow's mass art, but this statement would have to be taken so literally that it would be rendered ridiculous; Dada only began 19 years before Benjamin wrote his “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” a time frame that Benjamin would surely deem significantly too short to enable a change in “the mode of human sense perception,” which itself only “changes with humanity’s entire mode of existence.”[3] On this ground, it cannot be maintained that Benjamin offers a theory of mass art (mass art per Carroll's definition). 

Moreover, Carroll's case for the progress argument neglects elements from Benjamin's essay that obscure it. Most prominent in this regard is Carroll's assertion that mechanically reproduced art has a “tendency toward serving mass political ends – such as galvanizing concerted mass criticism on the part of a united audience – as a function of its mass reproducibility.”[4] More specifically, this interpretation of Benjamin holds that “mass art contributes to historical progress both as an emblem and an exercise in the sort of technical (proletarian), emancipatory vision/consciousness that will release the productive forces (…).”[5] These statements, inexplicably, do not account for the following characterisations of the involvement of the capitalist in the film industry: So long as the movie-makers’ capital sets the fashion, as a rule no other revolutionary merit can be accredited to today’s film than the promotion of a revolutionary criticism of traditional concepts of art. We do not deny that in some cases today’s films can also promote revolutionary criticism of social conditions, even of the distribution of property.[6]

 What is more, “[i]n Western Europe the capitalistic exploitation of the film denies consideration to modern man’s legitimate claim to being reproduced.” Thus, on the basis of Benjamin's essay it is too much to claim that art tends to aid in the emancipation of the proletariat – on the contrary, the industry of the mechanically reproduced art serves as an extension of the capitalist's exploitation of the proletariat. Despite this inclination the film does possess the – apparently underdeveloped or rarely used – capabilities of transcending its criticism from the purely artistic to the socio-economic and political realm (i.e. promoting the proletariat's interests), a potential emphasised by Benjamin – who introduces his essay by focusing on its utility “for the formulation of revolutionary demands in the politics of art” – but exaggerated by Carroll.[7]

 Although Carroll suggests otherwise, Benjamin's account of modern art evidently is not unequivocally celebratory, or completely in line with the progress argument. Although “mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual,” it does not necessarily follow that with the emancipation of art in the current epoch there is also the emancipation of mankind; as has already been noted, mechanically reproduced art serves as the opium of the people.[8] Merely on the basis – shaky though it is, as shown by Carroll – of Benjamin's analogy of Marx's prediction that capitalism would eventually enable its own destruction does Carroll label Benjamin's theory of art a celebration of mass art. This is as inaccurate as the claim that Marx wrote celebratory accounts of capitalism. Although Carroll rightly points out that both the style and argumentation of “The Work of Art in the Age of the Mechanical Reproduction” are opaque, his own interpretation of the essay twists it to an unreasonable extent.

By Caspar Plomp (third year student, LUC The Hague)

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[1] Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm (accessed 6 October 2012).
[2] Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”
[3] Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”
[4] Noël Carroll, A Philosophy of Mass Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2009), 120.
[5] Carroll, A Philosophy of Mass Art, 127-128.[6] Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”
[7] Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”
[8] Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”

12.12.12 coming soon ...

Remember, the world will end on 21.12 ...

In collaboration with the Political Arts Initiative, the LUC Research Centre brings you the annual 'Philosophy in the World' lecture on 12.12.12.  Prof Chris Goto-Jones, dean of Leiden University College in The Hague, will speak on 'Life at the End of Days: Philosophy and Apocalypse' at 18.00 (venue tbc).  The lecture will be followed by a drinks reception.
Please mark the date of the beginning of the end in your diaries, and check back to find out where it will happen ...