Normal View Dyslexic View
Commentary
As though the ’80s never happened – recalibrating value through music
Georgina Born*†
g.born@ucl.ac.uk
Abstract
How can we renew awareness of the civic value of the arts and humanities? This article responds to this question mainly with reference to music. It notes the rise since the 1990s of extrinsic criteria of value evident in sociological, economic and psychological arguments for the significance of music and the arts, which risk a profound instrumentalisation. In reaction, recent defences of the arts stage a stand-off against sociological perspectives, in particular, returning to older humanistic defences. Recalling the growth of interdisciplinary popular music and cultural studies from the 1980s, which unveiled the multivalent relationships between aesthetic and social dimensions of music, sets this polarisation into relief, productively shifting the debate. Music emerges as a vital medium for living, active in differentiated lives, an environment that may alone proffer meaning, pleasure, hope and a sense of collective imaginative and public life amid intensifying anxiety, desperation and the denial of collectivity. (This article is published in the thematic collection ‘The arts and humanities: rethinking value for today—views from Fellows of the British Academy’, edited by Isobel Armstrong.)
Keywords
civic valuemusicartsaestheticssociological perspectivesinstrumentalisationpopular music studiescultural studies Our topic is the civic value of the arts and humanities—and others are speaking to that head-on. But I hope you will allow me to start by coming at it obliquely, in terms of our relationship with ourselves—I mean, ‘we’ who work in the arts, social sciences and humanities. I speak as someone who has studied art and culture as an anthropologist, particularly music, and who was also a musician. I want to suggest the need for self-critical reflection in order to make progress on this challenge of the public crisis of the value of the humanities and arts. I’m going to suggest that, for civic value arguments to be convincing and enduring, we should in certain respects get our own house in order.
It has occurred to me in recent years that two things happen when we’re asked to defend the value of what we do. The first is to fall back on an assumed consensus in our fields about the value of the kind of knowledge and insights into being human we produce—as if we all already agree and know what that value is. This can be allied to very traditional defences of the humanities—without the grounds of those defences being made explicit and contemporary, which is surely problematic.
The second is to do with a profound ambivalence—also on my part—about the social valence of the arts and humanities. For a renewed sociological instrumentalism has come into view. One sign was the publication in 2016 by Geoffrey Crossick, former head of the AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council), and Patricia Kaszynska of a policy-oriented research report called Understanding the Value of Arts and Culture. Remarkable was how this report, under pressure to identify new sources of value, attempted to develop new measures and rationales adapted to the audit-led neoliberal academic environment. Particularly marked was a sociological turn such that participation in the arts was identified as having social value, along with a new valorisation of popular and ‘amateur’ cultures as well as the cultures of Britain’s black, Asian and ethnic minority communities. At the same time, the report argued that the arts and culture help to shape reflective individuals, promote engaged citizens, and stimulate urban regeneration. What were being proposed, then, were definitively extrinsic criteria of value and legitimation for the arts. What is curious is that similar arguments had been made in the 1980s under the banner of ‘cultural industries’ policies—which were soon denatured and economically instrumentalised in the neoliberal ‘creative industries’ policies that arose from the 1990s. And judging by the orientation of the AHRC, these extrinsic criteria of value have been firmly brought within the arts and humanities.
Also increasingly common, at least in relation to music, are arguments about health and wellbeing, cognitive benefits and dementia therapies as a bulwark against attacks on the value of music. New fields are growing, often allied to the sciences—cognitive science, neuroscience—and a lot of grant-getting is happening under these imperatives. To sociological and economic must therefore be added psychological instrumentalism.
Now for the ambivalence I spoke of—for in my view, the articulation of these extrinsic criteria of value is in some ways a positive development, since it recognises aspects of the value of the arts that are often overlooked. At the same time, it risks a profound instrumentalisation of the arts. In some of my own writing I’ve gone on to suggest that the academicisation of the creative arts, and the growth of PhDs allied to ideas of artistic and music research, might be seen as responding to the wider crisis over the value of the arts—although they too risk exacerbating this very sense of crisis.
My point is that we can acknowledge psychological, sociological and economic dimensions of the arts and humanities, and of their value, without suggesting that this is all there is, or that this is more important than other aspects of their value.
Why does this matter? In part because a war of words is currently being fought by those from the arts and humanities who parody sociological perspectives, imagining that sociologists of music and art seek, imperialistically, to reduce value to their own image. (And it’s striking that less fire is aimed at the far more pervasive economic and psychological instrumentalisms.) There seems to be a misrecognition of what sociological perspectives entail, and this becomes the basis for a return to older humanistic defences. Commonly, the anti-sociological stance takes Pierre Bourdieu as the key adversary, and indeed finds allies within social theory—not least the late Bruno Latour. Literary theorist Rita Felski (2015) has been a leading voice in this march against putative sociological reduction. Translating Latour’s critique of ‘critique’ (Latour 2004) into the humanities, she argues there must be a stand-off between attending to how a text ‘reveals or conceals … the social conditions that surround it’ and becoming aware of ‘what it sets alight in the reader’ (Felski 2015: 179).1 But why this stand-off? Aren’t the two related? Isn’t it time that we became interested in precisely that multivalent relationship, which itself poses new subtleties and complexities and enlarges our understanding of what it is both to experience and to make poetry, art or music?
My proposal is that it is time to get beyond existing polarities ‘for or against’ sociological understandings of the arts and culture, beyond unhelpful ‘either/or’ stand-offs, and instead to work conceptually with both the social and the aesthetic and the relationship between them in understanding the arts, their actuality and their value (Born 2010). This, at least, is what I’ve tried to do in a sustained body of work, particularly on music, most recently by pursuing this approach in contributions to a rich body of thought in genre theory. And if it’s still thought that this is a strange stance to adopt, then further support for this being not just an option but an imperative comes from an array of 20th- and 21st-century movements in the arts and music which themselves demand that we unravel those subtleties where the aesthetic and the social meet. I refer to a spate of artistic and musical movements since the mid-20th century—among them Fluxus, happenings, performance and installation art, institutional critique, and relational aesthetics—that have sought to cultivate a recognition not only that art and music are shaped by wider social and cultural processes, but that art and music themselves have the potential both to influence social processes and to model, enact and experiment with novel socialities and social relations (Born et al. 2017).
A second thread of what I want to say continues the theme, but from a different standpoint. I want to ask: Where are the challenges posed by the consolidation after the 1980s of cultural studies, media studies and popular music studies to present debates over the value of the arts and humanities? Two angles, I want to suggest, productively shift the debate:
First, the hostile times being endured by many communities and members of our own society demand that we acknowledge how the arts and culture—and my focus is on music, although the same could be said for poetry, literature or film—act not so much as an adjunct to individual lives but as a vital medium for living. Music has a special place in people’s lives; for people enduring troubled lives and lives in troubled times it can become an environment in which life swims, which sustains life—and sometimes even human flourishing (to echo Nussbaum (2001)). Approaches to the value of the humanities that begin from the problem of the intrinsic value of culture perhaps focus less on the insertion of culture into differentiated lives. Of all the arts, music illustrates this particularly well because there is no one musical culture. At a time like the present of extraordinary social and economic deprivation, of cultural and political polarisation, music’s affective powers demand that we consider how culture can permeate and sustain lives otherwise depleted by anguish, poverty, anger and alienation, providing solace and stimulation through experiences of imaginative empathy, commonality and transcendence otherwise utterly absent, even betrayed. Music—and perhaps other facets of culture and the arts—becomes an environment that perhaps alone proffers meaning, pleasure, imagination, hope and a sense of collective imaginative and public life amid intensifying anxiety, desperation and the denial of collectivity. And here, yes, I’m inveighing against the tendency to offer what are effectively 19th-century defences of 19th-century cultural forms—the image of the concert listener or novel reader sitting ‘alone-together’, engaged in cultivating her inner life. At stake is the need for a renewal of aesthetics as a social-philosophical project on a footing that could address difference as a base condition.
A second angle here goes to the vein in cultural studies and popular music scholarship since the 1980s proposing that figures like Nina Simone, Miles Davis or Afrika Bambaataa embody singular forms of genius in 20th-century culture, at the same time recognising the significance of collective cultural forms—among them dub reggae, hip hop and their prolific progeny. I’m pointing, in short, to the emergence of the interdisciplinary perspectives that fuelled academic scholarship on popular music and jazz. Since that time, the new fields of popular music and jazz studies have posed the need for a tectonic recalibration of music’s condition and value in the 20th and 21st centuries. They have done so by integrating aesthetic and social perspectives in our grasp of what these musics represent, how they thrive, circulate and live. But how has academic musicology responded? Largely, by not registering their difference, by not allowing their difference to make a difference in how music is conceptualised, taught and studied. By cramming these often non-notated, improvisatory, performance-based musics into the same 19th-century epistemological moulds as Western classical music.
Why should this matter for us today? In many ways. I want to suggest that until we allow the challenges posed by these 20th- and 21st-century forms of music and culture to transform our scholarship—both the 19th-century moulds of the humanities and its present-day, instrumentalised alternatives—we can’t offer positive proposals for the civic value of the arts and humanities that are fit for the urgent challenges of the present—that speak to the experiences of those on whose civic responsiveness and citizenly responsibility we depend to provide support against neoliberal travesties. In relation to our students, the public, the future: we have to update and revise—also in relation to the past, for new perspectives on the past arise from the inclusion of scholarship responsive to these overlooked, unintegrated cultures. This is how the arts and humanities can recalibrate value, and without it our relevance—but also the acuity of our conceptual paradigms—are diminished.
As Donna Haraway (1988) puts it in her plea for ‘partial perspectives’ and ‘situated knowledges’: this is to revalorise what the academy has kept as ‘subjugated knowledges’ and to allow them to disturb and revise our certainties in deeper ways than have happened so far. It’s not a question of add-ons—of adding the odd course on the Beatles, Beyoncé, or popular music history conforming to the same knowledge formats as historical musicology; or of making the occasional ‘EDI’ (equality, diversity and inclusion) appointments. Yet these two moves are largely how the academy has responded. Haraway reminds us that ‘how to see from below is a problem’ (584). She warns that ‘only those occupying the [dominant] positions … are self-identical, unmarked, disembodied, … and transcendent’ (586). And she argues—and this is crucial—that we ‘must be hostile to easy relativisms’, seeking instead to build ‘knowledge potent for constructing worlds less organised by axes of domination’ (585). This is surely a vital route into reshaping the debate around the civic value of the arts and humanities.
Acknowledgements
The thumbnail image that accompanies this article is by Pierre Gui on Unsplash.
References
BornG. (2010), ‘The social and the aesthetic: for a post-Bourdieuian theory of cultural production’, Cultural Sociology, 4(2): 171–208. https://doi.org/10.1177/1749975510368471
BornG., LewisE. & StrawW. (eds) (2017), Improvisation and Social Aesthetics (Durham, NC, Duke University Press) . https://doi.org/10.1515/9781478092766
CurrieJ. (2012), Music and the Politics of Negation (Bloomington, IN, Indiana University Press).
FelskiR. (2015), The Limits of Critique (Chicago, IL, Chicago University Press). https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226294179.001.0001
HarawayD. (1988), ‘The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective’, Feminist Studies, 14(3): 575–599. https://doi.org/10.2307/3178066
LatourB. (2004), ‘Why has critique run out of steam? From matters of fact to matters of concern’, Critical Inquiry, 30(2): 225–248. https://doi.org/10.1086/421123
NussbaumM. (2001), Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press) . https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511840715
SteingoG. (2019), Kwaito’s Promise: Music and the Aesthetics of Freedom in South Africa (Chicago, IL, Chicago University Press).
1
For other characteristic critiques of sociological perspectives on music, the arts and culture, see Steingo (2019), Currie (2012), and https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-16/the-intellectual-situation/too-much-sociology/.
Cite
DOI: 10.5871/jba/012.a39
Published on: 17 September 2024
Volume: 12
Issue: Issue 3
Article view count: 146
Article download count: 9
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© The author(s) 2024. This is an open access article licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International LicenseCite this article
Born, G. (2024), ‘As though the ’80s never happened – recalibrating value through music’, Journal of the British Academy, 12(3): a39 https://doi.org/10.5871/jba/012.a39Crossref
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Received
October 2022
Accepted
May 2023
Published
July 2023
Editors’ Introduction to Journal of the British Academy, Volume 12, Issues 1 & 2 Fiona Williams, Elizabeth Edwards, Andrew Hadfield
The Editors reveal their ambitions for the newly relaunched Journal of the British Academy, including an explanation of the types of articles that it will contain in future. There is also a description of the contents of the double issue with which the Journal is being relaunched.
22 May 2024
The arts and humanities: rethinking value for today—introduction Isobel Armstrong
This kaleidoscope of short pieces derives from two Fellows Engagement Week sessions (2022, 2023) in which speakers from across the British Academy—Theatre Studies, Anthropology, Modern History, History of Science, English, Philosophy, Music—gave ten-minute talks on the civic value of the arts and humanities. The British Academy’s SHAPE acronym, answering the Royal Society’s STEM formulation, understandably stresses the economic importance of arts and humanities in today’s challenging technological world (E is for Economy). The remit of this forum, however, was to remake and reclaim arguments for the civic importance of arts and humanities, recognising that accounts of the arts are often based on 19th-century arguments that no longer have force today. Three themes emerge from this forum: the importance of collaboration, the non-instrumental significance of aesthetic experience, and the centrality of language to civic life. (This article is published in the thematic collection ‘The arts and humanities: rethinking value for today—views from Fellows of the British Academy’, edited by Isobel Armstrong.)
10 September 2024
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