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The Persistence of Sentiment. Mitchell Morris
Читать онлайн.Название The Persistence of Sentiment
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780520955059
Автор произведения Mitchell Morris
Жанр Музыка, балет
Издательство Ingram
Such works might be defended, in the case of sheet music, by observers who wanted to point out the crafty abilities required to make the songs succeed. A song in sheet music form still requires a modicum of skill on the piano or the guitar and a singer who can carry off the tune in a way that will please listeners. No matter how exigent our standards, such a performance is nothing to sneer at. But what of listening to the radio or a recording? If there is a skill to listening to a modest song, we might have trouble discerning it. There are no proofs of performance that can be pointed out and discussed so that we all have a fair chance of agreeing or even a fair chance of disputing it in interesting ways. It is not that listening is altogether private. Listeners often try to share their emotional reactions and their thoughts with one another, and we can learn fascinating things about them even when they do not speak at all, if we simply observe the play of facial expression and body language that responds to the music as it addresses a listener’s body. But the ambiguities of listening are so great and our interior states so elusive that we might have no way of making ourselves adequately understood. The inaccessibility of our listening skills brings into play any number of questions about competency. It also causes us to wonder about sentimentality, that troublesome rubric under which notions of excess in the service of deception (of self, of others) has clustered in the wake of modernism’s austere fastidiousness about affect. Without the justification of difficulty, anything too moving will tumble us back into the realm of kitsch.
So far, the problems of defining kitsch may seem to make the term useless for discussions of popular music. It condemns while pretending to describe. Maybe we would be better off doing without it. But some of the points raised by Theodor Adorno in a series of nuanced accounts of kitsch can bring up significant points for consideration. In a brief essay from around 1932, Adorno, departing from the observation that one possible etymology of the term traces it from the English word “sketch,” emphasizes the incompleteness inherent in the idea as central to its paradoxical strength: “In music, at any rate, all real kitsch has the character of a model. . . . Kitsch is the precipitate of devalued forms and empty ornaments from a formal world that has become remote from its immediate context. . . . Kitsch is a kind of receptacle of mythic basic materials of music, as they appear only in it, transformed, as the most advanced results of music’s dialectic, but are otherwise lost. Hence kitsch is to be preferred to all music of the juste milieu.”34
For Adorno, the emptying out of musical structures that had carried genuine meaning is perhaps a melancholy inevitability of historical failure. In conserving those structures musical kitsch might be thought to act as a kind of sonic-affective museum and to have genuine conservational value. The pastness of such artifacts is left only as background, however: kitsch wishes to depend upon them for the sake of their lusciousness and prestige, but can only do so by pretending that they are not in fact lost at all. As Richard Leppert emphasizes, Adorno thus sees kitsch as a betrayal of historical situation. It “invokes a past that is nostalgically misremembered; as such kitsch is a means to forget—but less to forget the past than the present. Kitsch offers consolation, not so as to change anything but to make the anything of the here and now slightly more tolerable.”35
Kitsch is thus a superlative vehicle of false consciousness.36 Given Adorno’s determination to hold out for musical truth, kitsch can never be fully acceptable. Kitsch is good to the extent that it lies openly. But Adorno also admits that the problem of feigning is endemic to all art. In his late work, Aesthetic Theory, Adorno notes:
Kitsch is not, as those believers in erudite culture would like to imagine, the mere refuse of art, originating in disloyal accommodation to the enemy; rather, it lurks in art, awaiting ever recurring opportunities to spring forth. Although kitsch escapes, implike, from even a historical definition, one of its most tenacious characteristics is the prevarication of feelings, fictional feelings in which no one is actually participating, and thus the neutralization of these feelings. Kitsch parodies catharsis. Ambitious art, however, produces the same fiction of feelings; indeed, this was essential to it: The documentation of actually existing feelings, the recapitulation of psychical raw material, is foreign to it. It is vain to try to draw the boundaries abstractly between aesthetic fiction and kitsch’s emotional plunder.37
The great problem with kitsch continues to be that of false consciousness: but Adorno knows better than anyone that this concept is irremediably slippery. And not only because the line between kitsch and art is so blurry. After all, the one thing we can always say about false consciousness is that its diagnosis is always external, the result of a conceptual reality check. (This is true even in solo cases because a realization of false consciousness depends upon an internalized objectification of the “self.”) But false consciousness entails more than a few isolated incidents about which intersubjective agreement can be reached. As a result, it cannot be convincingly diagnosed without an adequate understanding of the internal point of view from which the situation is regarded as true, in addition to the careful marshalling of exterior arguments that would seem to contradict this point of view. And its diagnosis should always be taken dialogically as a beginning rather than a conclusion.
In keeping with this dialogic imperative, we should note that Adorno’s observation about kitsch’s use of “devalued forms and empty ornaments” is extremely interesting because it raises the question of whence the value and fullness come in the first place. Working against interprettive custom, we might assume that the investments of listeners could be most fruitful precisely where composers and performers have left the most space. Yes, this is a fetishistic maneuver. Is such an aesthetic perversion always a bad thing? Is it not more often a compromise solution (and one that can work for a lot of people)? Only from an insistently normativizing point of view can we flatly declare such listener investments to be altogether wrong. Yes, such actions can also be taken as lacking respect for the creators of the music as well as the work itself; but if a modest song is meant to be a thing rather than a quasi-person, such exquisitely appropriative attitudes might be taken as gestures of respect for the song’s actual purpose. Maybe modest songs are not music (nor were ever meant to be) in Adorno’s strict sense.
In the same way, the question of “misremembering” encourages us to ask who is deciding what the correct memory is, as well as why consolation is altogether a bad thing. From Adorno’s point of view, our awareness of human suffering must be kept in focus. Surely Adorno thought that it is necessary to insist upon such an ascetic goal, however, because musical pleasure seems, if not self-evident, at least more immediate. But if you occupy a social position in which the shape and the very nature of pleasure (in consequence, desire—and in consequence, agency) are precisely what is in question, then the particulars of your pleasure and your consolation are not trivial at all.
Finally, there is the question of the emplacement of kitsch within historical narrative. The bad morality of kitsch objects also makes them unsuited for plots that privilege the heroic, largely because the concept of kitsch blurs so quickly into the concept of the everyday or the trivial. Many of the most influential accounts of art of literature have taken a Hegelian slant, with great figures or advances in technique gain hegemony over a historical moment, to be surpassed dialectically in succeeding generations.38 However suspicious we might be about the assumptions required to tell such stories, we must recognize them as compelling. If our taste is for titans, however, then an art of everydayness is likely to seem at least insipid if not actually dangerous. The ordinary becomes kitschified because the “OK” is the enemy of the “great.” I have already mentioned the exceptional liking for stories of greatness in music history: the same taste holds true in the realm of pop music as well, as any quick scan of popular histories of rock will show. Lots of popular music, it seems, can have no history. I hope that the discussions that follow will offer some historical possibilities.
DOMAINS OF IDENTITY
Patti LaBelle’s 1978 disco song “Music Is My Way of Life” presents a first person who has nothing in the way of resistance. In this hopelessly abject position, there is one refuge, the dance floor. “When I dance they look at me / That’s one thing you can’t take from me.”