The Philosophy of Art is the Philosophy of Technology

Guest post by C. Thi Nguyen

People keep asking me why I work in both the philosophy of art and social epistemology. I guess it must seem like an especially weird stew. But for me, they’re intellectual soulmates. Social epistemology studies how we work together to understand things — how we pass information around and intellectually collaborate. And art is one of our most important techniques for communication and connection. It is a key method for recording subtle emotions, complex perspectives, and rich ways of seeing the world.

[image from the video game Braid {source}]

Most importantly: the philosophy of art — at least my favorite parts of it — is deeply concerned with the technology of communication. My favorite aesthetics stuff is obsessed with the tiny details how each medium has its own particular communicative strengths and weaknesses. It’s obsessed with the deep difference between photography and painting, between comics and film, between movies and video games. It’s interested in how tiny shifts in the technical medium can open the door to vastly different expressive potentials and social patterns. Oil paints, photography, film, sound recording technology, video games — each of these involves some new technology which yields new expressive potentials. Seen from a certain angle, the history of art is a history of technological shifts and their social impact. It’s the history of artists, and artistic communities, mining every new technology for some fresh communicative potential.

And sometimes these medium shifts are quite subtle. Here’s one of my favorite examples: Stanley Cavell thinks that the medium of film changed essentially in the sixties.[1] Before the mid-sixties, you didn’t go to a movie; you went to the movies. As in: there were no published schedules of movie times. You went to the theater, paid an entrance fee, and just sat down and watched whatever was showing, for as long as you wanted. So filmmakers were making films catering to that viewing environment: people walking in the door and watching whatever was playing.

But in the mid-sixties, movie theaters started publishing specific showing times for specific films, and people started showing up for specific films. According to Cavell, this apparently tiny social shift essentially changes the relationship between filmmaker and audience. Because an audience member can now think of themselves as being interested in a particular kind of movie — action, horror, Westerns, art-house. And filmmakers can start making films, not for a generic audience, but for an audience of self-conceived fans of a particular genre. So the publishing of film schedules splinters the film-going and film-making world into channels and sub-communities. Cavell thinks that this constitutes a deep change in the core artistic medium of film itself.

This observation teaches us a few things. First: what’s most important about a medium for communication often isn’t in the raw material at the center, but in its social embeddedness. Much of what is crucial to the medium of film isn’t just in the images and sounds — it’s in the social process of theater-going. It’s in the fact that showtimes are, or aren’t, published in the newspaper. Second: tiny changes in the medium can have enormous social repercussions and shift the whole pattern of how people relate to an artform.

In the social epistemology world, I’ve been working a lot on the technology of communication — like about how social media structures the motivation of its users. As I’ve been working my way through these projects, I keep looking to traditional philosophical work on epistemology and finding it mostly unhelpful. But I keep finding bits of aesthetics and the philosophy of art incredibly useful, in a thousand unexpected ways. My theory, now, is that philosophical epistemology has mostly tended to think about communication in a vacuum. Philosophical work on the nature of testimony, for example, largely tends to seek invariant and universal conditions for the transmission of knowledge. It’s looking at underlying similarities between different communicative modes. That kind of approach is certainly useful for all sorts of projects. But if you’re trying to understand the impact of specific technologies of communication, then the universalizing tendency will lead you away from the grit and texture and particularity of different communicative mediums.

The philosophy of art, on the other hand, is obsessed with grit and texture and specificity. Traditional epistemology, as I was brought up to do it, de-materializes communication, ripping it from its social and technological context. But the philosophy of art is obsessed with the material nature of communication, and the impact of the specific details of different social practices of communication. It cares about the specific way that photographs transmit information, as opposed to paintings. It cares about the communicative difference between a secured painting in a museum and a piece of street art that’s out there in the public, vulnerable to modification by any passer-by. The philosophy of art cares about how a dancer and a non-dancer have deeply different experiences when watching a dance. It cares about how the concrete physicality of monuments changes their meaning — and about how the context of display shapes that meaning.

I spent some of last month writing something about the impact of Twitter’s length constraint — about how enforced shortness shapes how people connect on that platform. I couldn’t find anything in the philosophical literature on testimony that helped me grapple with the impact of enforced brevity. But what I did find incredibly useful was Ted Cohen’s beautiful little book on the aesthetics of jokes. Cohen’s theory is that the shortness of jokes evokes intimacy between joke-teller and joke-hearer, because the hearer must fill in all the information that can’t fit in the joke. And that thought unlocked, for me, the peculiar magical — and dangerous — feel of Twitter.

In retrospect, this should have been entirely unsurprising. Because where are you going to kind really deep thinking about what it means to communicate under extreme limitations of shortness? And where will you find studies of what happens when speakers try to actually embrace that shortness, to turn it from a limitation into a virtue? It won’t be in some abstract theory about testimony. It’ll be in the work of people who have spent an enormous time thinking about jokes, or haiku, or sonnets. It’ll be in the art critics, the art historians, and the philosophers of art, where people think obsessively about how the specific details of peculiar formats and media and social context shape the nature of communication.

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[1] I found out about this bit of Cavell from the philosopher of art Daniel Wack.

The Art Solipsist

Guest post by C. Thi Nguyen

[cross-posted at Aesthetics for Birds]

I was a pretty isolated kid, raised on classical music and 60’s rock and roll by my parents. Then, in high school, I started making, you know, actual friends. And they expanded my musical world, but only a little bit. The indie rock they got me into was pretty close to the classic rock and classical music my parents had raised me. The aesthetic sensibility, the particular flavor of emotional build-up and release — they all made sense to my ear. But I distinctly remember, in my teenage years, having my first exposures to rap and thinking: this isn’t music. This is just some dudes, like, talking. All the melody is just this hyper-simplistic looping sample, and then they’re just, like, talking over it. Where’s the music?

This is now an exquisitely embarrassing memory. My tastes have blown well past those early borders. I’ve become the kind of person who thinks that, right now, some of the greatest heights of musical wonder and emotional expression are pouring out of the world of rap and hip hop, and later stuff that has grown out of the soundscape of hip-hop. But I can still remember what it was like, to be my teenage self, hearing rappers that I would eventually come to revere — Nas, Erik B, Biggie — and somehow hearing just some dudes, like, talking.

The transformation in experience is particularly sharp with Wu Tang Clan’s ultra-classic, Enter the 36th Chamber. Eventually, this album would come to reside in the bleeding core of my musical aesthetic — a mind-bending, world-warping musical wonder. But on the first exposure I missed all of it: all the weird genius use of silence and gaps, all the emotional load in those de-tuned strings, all the textural contrasts, the way the reverb-laden old R&B sounds conjured up sad nostalgia, all that ferocious metrical genius. The first few times I heard it, all I heard was just some dudes, like, yelling.

Caption: Screencap from Wu Tang Clan, C.R.E.A.M.

What got me through was somebody I trusted telling me to listen to it, telling me to give it serious attention. I had somebody I trusted deeply, assuring me that there wonders in Wu Tang I wasn’t hearing — that it was worth the effort. And they said things that helped me find those wonders. I remember what my buddy told me: “If you’re used to listening only to classical and rock, you’re used to a complex and varying melodies over a simple repeating rhythm line. But with a lot of rap, it’s a simple repeating melody, and everything interesting is going on in the vocals, as a complex and endlessly rhythmic line. You have to listen in the right place.”

That comment really helped me parse what was going on in rap, to actually pay attention to where the action was. The words helped me focus in the right place. But the most important part was that there somebody I trusted deeply, in aesthetic matters — whose taste I respected about food and novels and classical music — also telling me that this Wu Tang stuff was worth listening to, worth my time and energy.[1]

Because navigating the world of art takes trust. This is the basic epistemic dilemma of much art: many forms of art takes time and devotion to really get. So why would you ever put in the effort in the first place? Before you learn to hear all the subtleties of a particular genre or style — or even a particular album — it can just sound worthless. So why put in the energy? Where would the motivation come from?

Some art is, let’s say, difficult. A piece of art is difficult if its value isn’t obvious from first inspection — if it takes some time and effort to see that it’s worth your time and effort. (This is my own slightly personalized terminology.) Maybe some art is difficult for everybody — like maybe Marianne Moore’s peculiar and hyper-dense poems. Her poems are so utterly unlike anything else, that you just kind of have to learn to figure out what the hell Moore is doing.

But in many cases, difficulty is relative to familiarity and experience. Somebody like me who grew up on classical music probably experiences no difficulty listening to a new, complex piece in a familiar style. But rappers like Notorious B.I.G. were difficult for me when I first encountered even his poppiest stuff, with my utter paucity of rap experience.

And the whole point is that difficult art doesn’t always wear its difficulty on its face. Some stuff is showily difficult. I bet, for a lot of people, if you first encountered Joyce’s Ulysses or John Coltrane’s Giant Steps and didn’t get it, you’d see that there was a serious, complex, arty thing there. The surface density makes it clear that there’s something to chew on, there. But other stuff is stealth difficult. Like Biggie’s “Juicy”, for teenage me: I didn’t get it, so it sounded like nothing, like simplistic fluff. It seemed simplistic to me because I was looking in the wrong place; I just wasn’t attuned enough even to realize how much weird, fascinating, subtle rhythmic texture was in his vocal line. I wasn’t listening for the way he caressed the beat; I was just listening for some goddamn melody, because that’s the only place I was trained to look for musical complexity.

I think haiku can be like this for a lot of people too: if you’re raised expect poetry to wave complex symbolism in your face, and drown you in fancy literary references, then the surface clarity of haiku can just make it seem like superficial fluff.

So, if you’re not steeped in a form, or even a particular artist, it’s easy to encounter something and not see what’s really going on, and miss it. You can dismiss Ornette Coleman’s free jazz improvisations as random noise, or Theodore Rothko’s moody color studies as pretentious art-world bunk, or Joanna Newsom’s dense expressive textures as precious hippie hipster shit.

Caption: Light Red Over Black, Mark Rothko, 1957

If you’re trained, like I was, in the aesthetic of clear controlled vocals and melodic complexity, then your first encounter with punk might just yield total disdain. The whole expressive aim of punk is just so far from what you’re used to, you might just not get it.

But it’s not like you can just spend your attention on anything. This is the heart of the problem: it’s not like every piece of art is worthwhile. The world is actually full of random noise, pretentious art-world bunk, and precious worthless hipster shit. And we need to be able to filter it out quickly, so we don’t waste energy on the crap. The deep epistemic problem of art is that, when you’re an outsider, you just can’t tell the poser crap from the good stuff. But to be able to tell, you need to gain skill and experience — which takes effort. And since we are cognitively limited beings with incredibly tiny shares of time and energy, facing a ceaselessly and endlessly overwhelming world, we need a good reason to spend that time and effort. Attention is the most precious cognitive resource. But difficult art is exactly the stuff that, on its face, doesn’t give you a reason to spend that resource. So why would we ever spend the time and effort?

I think the answer is: a lot of the time, it’s because we trust somebody. Maybe we trust a reviewer or a critic or a teacher, or a friend with shared taste. Maybe we trust the artist — so if you dug Miles Davis’ early, more comprehensible stuff, you might spend the effort to dig into his weirder-sounding later stuff, even if it just strikes you as totally bizarre on a first listen. Maybe you trust a community. For example: right now, the Atlanta trap musical community is putting out such a constant stream of relentlessly good stuff, that I’ll basically give at least one serious listen to anything that comes out of the scene.

It is extremely hard to understand how we would ever possibly navigate the world of art on our own. It’s the social network that surrounds and interweaves the world of art, that makes it possible for us to expand our tastes, that gives us the motivation to press on into the unfamiliar.

This also helps us diagnose some problems and traps that might arise in the aesthetic exploration process.

Imagine a kind of person who simply doesn’t trust anybody else about art. (Probably, you don’t have to imagine them; you probably already know lots.) Let’s call this distrusting person Roger. Roger experiences a piece of art — if they listen to a song, or watch a TV show — and doesn’t like it. Then somebody else tells Roger, “Oh my god, that artist/show/album/book/genre is amazing! Give it another go.” An adequately trusting person would, in the right circumstances, give that kind of testimony some weight. The adequately trusting person might, say, let another’s positive word outweigh their own first impressions.

But Roger does not. Roger extends no real aesthetic trust to other people. Maybe he grants a tiny sliver of trust, in that he’ll take recommendations of stuff he hasn’t heard. But Roger always trusts his first impressions over the word of others. In any conflict, Roger dismisses others’ taste, rather than let others’ word push him to re-examine things. Even in cases when it’s Roger’s brief opinion up against somebody else’s life-long devotion: Roger dismisses. Roger would rather think that, say, the entire world of people who were into rap were all just crude simpletons, rather than think that he might have missed something — that he might have failed to cultivate the right sensibility. Roger cannot imagine that there is a difficult skill to listening to rap, that he might need time and experience to catch onto.

Perhaps you know people like this. We can call them aesthetic solipsists: in their universe, their experience overrides all other people’s. Their own experience is the only one that carries weight. They act as if other people’s aesthetic experiences didn’t really exist — as if it was impossible for another person to carry a sensitivity that they themselves did not.

And we can find a subtle social variant of the aesthetic solipsist. Imagine a person who does trust lots of others and takes their recommendations — and even occasionally lets a deeply trusted advisor give them reason to think again. But they extend their trust based only on a pattern of profound similarity of taste. So: imagine I grew up only into classical music and I despised hip hop. So I choose who I trust about aesthetic matters based on who agrees with my specific taste. That is, I only trust other people if they share my love of classical, and my specific tastes in classical — and only if they despise hip hop. (You can imagine the thought process of such a person: anybody who is into hip hop, by that very fact, reveals their bad taste.) So I let people I trust recommend me things; I will let a trusted advisor’s testimony partially override my own experiences, and let them direct me to look again at a performance or piece that I’d initially thought was bad. But notice that I will never, following my network of aesthetic trust, get into hip hop.

If I were to act this way, I wouldn't exactly be acting as a pure aesthetic solipsist. I would, sometimes, be letting a trusted advisor’s word outweigh my initial impressions. But something subtler, and perhaps creepier, would be going going on. I'll have hidden a more complex version of aesthetic solipsism inside the structure of my trust-network. Since I'd be trusting my advisors only if they largely align with my own tastes, then I will have constructing an aesthetic echo chamber. My trust in others will be based, in its root, on profound trust in the clarity and completeness of my own taste, and so will have constructed my social world of art so that I will never be able to expand, and comprehend new forms of loveliness and expression.

Endnote: This blog post draws from some scholarly work of mine: “Trust and Sincerity in Art” and “Cognitive Islands and Runaway Echo Chambers”. Autobiographical side-note: I’ve written some stuff on political echo chambers, but I actually started thinking about echo chambers, long ago, on cases about art and aesthetics. My original question was: is there any way for an outsider to tell the difference between a community with an aesthetic sensitivity that the outsider did not possess, and a community of hipster posers?

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Something similar I think is going on with the Dissect Podcast, which devotes a whole season to dissecting particular hip hop albums. The podcast has done Kendrick Lamar, Frank Ocean, Beyonce, Lauren Hill. In particular, there is a particularly excellent Season 2, devoted to dissecting Kanye West’s astonishing My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. I have some private reservations, though. On the one hand, I’ve recommended that podcast to a whole legion of friends, who were often hip-hop averse, and the intellectual clarity to the podcast has brought so many skeptics to see the depth in these albums. Host Cole Cuchna is particularly good at getting people to see the density and subtlety going on underneath the surface. On the other hand, I am sometimes worry that the podcast involves an extremely obviously white host, with a background in classical musical theory, and a perfectly NPR voice, getting people onto Black music. My discomfort isn’t about appropriation or anything, and it’s no knock on Cuchna’s obvious pedagogical brilliance. It’s just a discomfort about the fact that so many people seem to need the stamp of approval of a Western European Musical Expert, with every possible signifier of whiteness, to let themselves be guided into getting hip hop. Of course, then again, my younger self probably wouldn’t have been willing to trust somebody about the wonder of rap, if that somebody hadn’t already proven their chops to me in my classical music world. So maybe it’s all fine and I should just relax. In short, listen to Dissect, especially Season 2.

What Zoom Removes

Guest post by C. Thi Nguyen

The paradox of Zoom is: it should make life easy, but it can also make life really, really hard.

My time teaching on Zoom basically broke me. It left me spiritless, drained, miserable. One standard explanation is that the physical and cognitive experience of Zoom is exhausting in and of itself — that Zoom screws with all these minutae of eye contact and bodily signaling. But I’ve started to suspect that the effects of Zoom extend far beyond the experience of actually being on Zoom. Zoom re-orders your entire life.

Halfway through my first Zoom teaching term, I was absolutely falling apart. I slowly realized that, for me, a big part of it was that Zoom had eliminated by commute. Which is strange, because I thought I hated my commute. But my commute had also been one of the few totally isolated parts of my day. I was sealed off from other people and from other demands — from my email, from my phone, from my children. My car commute was enforced non-productive time. And it was non-negotiable. In work-from-home pandemic life, you can try to tell yourself that you should go for a walk or something every day. But when push comes to shove, you can always give up that walk. The commute cannot be bargained with.

Kelsey Piper puts it this way: sometimes, a tiny change in your routine can throw everything out of whack. You didn’t realize that the little change you made took out a load-bearing support for your whole emotional infrastructure. You didn’t realize that your walk to lunch was your only bit of sunshine and fresh air — and how much you needed those moments to unclench. You didn’t realize that this yoga class imposed an specific schedule into your day, or that this new emailing app would mean getting work emails on your phone 24/7. And so you change one little thing, and then everything goes haywire.

Albert Borgmann, the philosopher of technology (and one of Heidegger’s last students), talks about a similar effect, writ large. He’s worried about what a culture might unthinkingly eliminate, in the march of technology. What happens when a society takes out one of its load-bearing supports?

According to Borgmann, there are two basic kinds of human artifacts: things and devices. Things are embedded in a complex network of activity and socialization. His favorite example: a wood-burning stove. Using a wood-burning stove drags you into a complex and textured form of life. You have to acquire the wood. This means going out to chop it yourself, or talking with somebody who will chop it for you. You have to stack the wood. You have to manage the fire — watching it, stirring it, adding fuel to it. And a wood-burning stove creates a particular social world. It create a center for home life, says Borgmann — a social focal point. There is a warm spot where people congregate, and a periphery to where people can retreat. The wood-stove drags with it an entire pattern of life — of skill, of involvement, of attention to the world, of a particular embedded in a social web.

Compare a wood-burning stove with central heating. Central heating is a device. Central heating makes heat appear invisibly and effortlessly. It appears out of nowhere, evenly distributed. You don’t have to fuss with anything, or know anything about how the heat was made. You don’t have to exercise any sort of skill. The method of production drops out of sight.

Says Borgmann:

We have seen that a thing such as a fireplace provides warmth, but it inevitably provides those many other elements that compose the world of the fireplace. We are inclined to think of these additional elements as burdensome, and they were undoubtedly often so experienced. A device such as a central heating plant procures mere warmth and disburdens us of all other elements. They are taken over by the machinery of the device. The machinery makes no demands on our skill, strength, or attention, and it is less demanding the less it makes its presence felt.

The progress of technology, says Borgmann, is driving us further into what he calls “the device paradigm”. The point of a device lies solely in its output — what he calls its commodity. The commodity of central heating is warmth. The commodity of a car is transportation. And unlike a thing, a device gives its users that commodity disconnected from the process of its creation. Frozen food lets you have a meal without cooking it for yourself. Central heating lets you have warmth without fussing around with a wood stove. A device is a kind of shortcut to its commodity. And if we think that all we really want is that commodity — then we want the device to hide from us all the mechanisms by which it creates those commodities. We want the process shoved out of sight, excised from our lives. So we make better devices, that give us faster access to what we think we want. They are better, from our perspective, because they further disentangle the commodity from all these other burdensome elements.

Of course, the key is that we only think these other elements are burdensome. But these burdensome elements also drive us into the complex world, says Borgmann. They drive us into social relationships, into activity, into a rich and sensuous experience of the detailed world. Devices divest us of that. They give us only the thing that we thought we had wanted. But that’s good only if we know exactly what’s good for us.

In graduate school, as I was losing myself to stress, I became temporarily obsessed with fishing. I fantasized about it, I craved it, and I went every weekend I could. I was also terrible at it. I caught an embarrassingly small number of fish, in my years of fishing. Eventually I gave it up as another failed hobby. Without it, I could devote so many more of my hours to my research.

Of course, once I eliminated fishing, my mental and emotional state started to deteriorate, and fast. Here was my mistake: I had thought that the point of fishing was to catch some fish. But, in reality, it was not. The process of fishing was one that forced me out of my tiny apartment, out of the library, away from books and computers. It made me suffer through LA traffic (while listening to music). It made me search through forgotten mountain paths for an unfished stream. It made me stand in a river and do nothing but stare at moving water for hours on end. It gave me days that were so full of fussy and physical detail that I had to stop thinking about philosophy completely. And then I got rid of it, because I didn’t actually understand what I was getting out of it. Fishing wasn’t just about fish. It was a pattern of a whole life, dragged in by the attempt to catch a little fish.

Zoom, I want to suggest, is a device. It is a device for communication. And my point here isn’t that Zoom is somehow “fake” communication, or that virtual meetings aren’t real. It’s that Zoom gets rid of all the other stuff that surrounds a communicative encounter. It makes communication frictionless. It delivers communication as a commodity. Zoom offers a whole new basic pattern and rhythm for a life, by divesting us of that burdensome friction. Without Zoom, you had to commute to school or work. You had to listen to your stupid podcasts and your music. You had to walk around and run into people, to negotiate with them, to chat aimlessly with them, to figure out how to co-occupy physical spaces with them. Before the Zoom Era, I had to fly to conferences, which involved this whole weird complex and deeply annoying endeavor that took me out of my habit, out of my standard rituals. Flying pushed me into strange parts of the world where I had to re-orient myself, to figure out how to be in a space that wasn’t my own. With Zoom, I can go to an unlimited number of international conferences effortlessly. But also, I never leave the habitual patterns of my home life.

Of course, Zoom also brings enormous benefits. So does every device. In my academic life, it’s apparent: Zoom makes it easier for people without travel funding to attend conferences, for students with complex childcare obligations to attend classes. Dishwashers ease the burden of domestic labor. And I’m certainly not giving up my dishwasher or my motorized transport, and the ease and accessibility that Zoom offers is basically irresistible.

But Borgmann gives us a reason, at least, to be cautious with a device, to watch carefully how it reshapes our lives. A lot of times, the value of a thing in our lives is not just what it presents, on its face, as its function. So much of the time, the beauty of an activity is in the process of doing it, and not the simple output. But it’s easy to forget. Things spread their tendrils through our lives, they reshape our interactions and procedures in a thousand countless ways. Devices like Zoom — efficient, frictionless little miracles — give us what we think we want, but they also cut off all those tendrils. And sometimes there was value in that friction, too.

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