Wednesday, 7 November 2012

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.

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