32
A Cheap Holiday in Other People’s Misery? Yes, Indeed:
Towards Compatibilism about Immoral Art
Jon Cogburn and Graham Bounds
What deep connections, if any, are there between ethical and aesthetic judgments? Recent philosophy of art uniformly presents this issue in terms of a titanic struggle between the autonomist, who wishes to keep ethical and aesthetic concerns separated (thus, autonomous), and the moralist, who is not so quick to claim daylight between the two. Since radical versions of these theses have few adherents, contemporary literature is to some extent concerned with moderating one view or the other and then defending against other possibilities.
Our purpose with respect to this antinomy is quite different, something more Hegelian. That is, even though they are inconsistent, (radical) moralism and (moderate) autonomism are both nonetheless true, and as a result what’s needed is a an approach that resolves the contradiction while affirming the essence of each.
We achieve this here, albeit in something of a roundabout way. First, we present the problem of immoral art in what strikes us as its most extreme form. The problem is not the worry that some good art might be immoral because of features (such as history of production) that one might reasonably argue to be aesthetically accidental.[1] Rather, some art is immoral in virtue of well instantiating the very same features that make non-immoral art succeed. Any satisfactory theory of the connection between ethical and aesthetic properties must squarely face this problem in all of its awfulness. Second, like all good dialecticians we must go back to Kant, here considering the actual theory of judgment from the third critique. Though this is not a historical paper, if our reading is correct, then Kant’s aesthetics have been systematically misread by those who do not grasp the novelty and power of Kant’s distinction between the act and content of judgment. Anyone who absorbs the proper lessons of our Fichtean hubris will then have the resources to deal with immoral art without having to banish all of the poets. It is only while making this point that we will explicate the contemporary debate between moralism and autonomism, at which point it will have been overcome.
I. A Sorites Problem for Immoral Art
No genre of art today should provoke more moral outrage than the subgenre of punk rock known as “white power punk,” where bands such as Skrewdriver routinely celebrate violence against religious, sexual, and ethnic minorities. Perhaps the only good thing one can say about this music is that overwhelming majority of it is irrelevant to any serious autonomy/moralism debate, simply because independently of its repellent content it is not very good art.
Of course one might rightfully object that this dismissal is too hasty, since aesthetic value is genre specific, and punk art tends to be invoked by positively by philosophers of art in the manner of Noël Carroll, as a tool to critique what one might regard as over-sophisticated versions of theories that define art (or artistic goodness) in terms of expressive power:
Some art, like Beat poetry and Punk Art, appears to covet pure, unrevised emotion - it aspires to let it all hang out. It is the stylistic purpose of some art, that is, to mine the emotions of the artist as close to the nerve as possible.[2]
Certainly white power punk achieves this goal, and to this extent is aesthetically successful vis a vis the success conditions particular to Carroll’s “Punk Art.” However, this is not enough to render it worthy of aesthetic attention,[3] even as punk rock. To see this, note that screaming after smashing one’s hand with a hammer also fulfills Carroll’s criterion.
In addition to its emotional immediacy, good punk rock such as that purveyed by The Stooges, The Sex Pistols, Black Flag, and The Dead Kennedys must also be good rock, and goodness in rock requires passing at least a minimal threshold of melodic catchiness inherited from the best of traditional folk music (in the United States, originally African American blues and Scottish American bluegrass, both of which were already amalgams of previous African and European musical traditions). All of the bands mentioned in this paragraph easily pass such a threshold. That is, one can play most of their songs on an acoustic guitar to a country or blues rhythm and not only does the performance still scan, but the melody is also something that is easy to remember and reproduce. But, thankfully, it requires a kind of intelligence and sensitivity to write a catchy tune, and as a result none of the white power bands come anywhere near passing this threshold.
This being said, there are songs that rightfully belong in the punk canon that are so morally problematic that it is almost as if they had been written to provoke the moralist’s censure. The Dead Kennedys’ Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables contains multiple songs narrated from the perspective of a deranged killer. While the band is clearly attempting to critique the capitalist society they see as creating the derangement of the songs’ narrator, the aesthetic success of some of the songs presupposes a problematic indeterminacy concerning the attitude the listener must take to the narrator. Clearly the narrator of “Stealing People’s Mail” is meant to be a humorous figure, and one hopes that the narrator of “I Kill Children” is not. But there is nothing about the songs or performances that mark the distinction. Moreover, the absurd humor laces through “Chemical Warfare,” which recounts the narrator’s using chemical weapons on wealthy people’s golf courses, further blurs the line between critique and celebration.
This is an old issue in popular music. Stagger Lee is indeed a bad man, but many of the songs about him and in the genre he personifies illustrate a not so subtle respect for the criminal. Weirdly while one sometimes finds this kind of indeterminacy in traditional country and blues, one almost never finds it in classic rock, glam rock, or the progressive rock against which the punks were revolting. However, it is common enough in punk rock so as to be a characteristic of the genre.
In punk, some of the best songs from the genre end up being the most morally problematic. A limiting case of this is certainly the Sex Pistols’ “Belsen Was a Gas,” which begins with the lyrics “Belsen was a gas, I heard the other day // In the open graves where the Jews all lay” and ends with the band’s singer imploring the listener to “Be a man / Kill a man / Be someone / Kill someone / Be a man / Kill yourself!” When Theodor Adorno (1984) quipped that poetry is not possible after Auschwitz, this is not what he had in mind.
If it is indeed possible for art to be immoral, then a song that begins with a pun on a successful method of genocidal killing certainly succeeds. It is thus irrelevant whether one (as is no means clear) can place just enough distance between narrator and songwriter so as not to interpret the ending of the song as a genuine encouragement to murder and suicide. The song is just wrong.
This being said, it is very difficult to find anything aesthetically wrong with it. The main riff D, C, D, E flat is both catchy and dissonant in a way perfectly suited to its nightmare lyrics. It is not insignificant that the E flat may be the very first use of the diminished second in a rock song, something now common in all subgenres of heavy metal. The performances are great in the paradoxical way that good punk performances are,[4] and they fit the lyrical content, especially John Lydon’s rabid howl, which peaks with him screaming affected laughter over the verse just prior to the final lyrics. If one could abstract from the lyrical content, it’s an extraordinary rock song. But this is in some sense beside the point. As far as our worry about the moral status of the art isn’t the point just that the representational content is both aesthetically and morally bad?
The problem is that it isn’t at all clear that the representational content renders the song aesthetically bad. It is not famous merely because of its inventive use of the diminished second chord and expressive power. Greil Marcus (2011) argues that it is in some sense the very last rock and roll song in part as a function of its lyrics. After noting that the song is a “musical version of the punk swastika”[5] he writes:
It meant, to take Nick Cohn’s definition of the impulse behind all postwar British pop subculture--the Teddy Boys of the 1950s, the Mods and Rockers of the 1960s, the Skinheads of the early 1970s, “My Dad’s a square. I hate him. I hate you too. I’ll smash your face in,” or diversion of that impulse into public business: I hate them too, let’s smash their faces in.[6]
While this is intrinsically unappealing to any sensible person, it represented the most extreme expression of a very real social worry that arguably gets at the heart of the song better than Cohn’s contention. Marcus himself contends:
It was a touch of the old épater la bourgeoisie. It meant, history books to the contrary, that facism had won the Second World War: that contemporary Britain was a welfare state parody of fascism, where people had no freedom to make their own lives--where, worse, no one had the desire. And it meant that negation is the act that would make it self-evident to everyone that the world is not as it seems--but only when the act is so complicit that it leaves open the possibility that the world may be nothing, that nihilism as well as creation may occupy the suddenly cleared ground.[7]
Marcus spends most of the book defending the claim that this form of absolute rejection as an aesthetic act was central to Situationism, and (perhaps less plausibly, but not absurdly) that one cannot understand modernity without understanding both the necessity of radical rejectionism and how rejectionist art leads to Situationism and ultimately to “Belsen Was a Gas,” which is self-negating in its nihilism. Marlon Brando’s “Whaddya got?” answer to the question, “What are you rebelling against, Jonny?” ends up being self-refuting for Marcus. But in good Hegelian fashion, this self-refutation is in some sense necessarily enacted in history. And here we are with our compact discs, youtube videos, and meaningless wars gaping after its end.
Nothing we write here depends on the veracity of Marcus’ guerilla retelling of the history of art as ending with the Sex Pistols. The only thing that is important to us in this regard is the spectre of an unsolvable sorites series that we have been considering. Marcus raises the possibility that the very things that make “Belsen was a Gas” morally odious is that it is in some sense the most perfect expression of what makes rock and roll and Situationism work aesthetically, artistic expression of opposition for opposition’s sake. And for Marcus the Sex Pistols are to be praised for showing how this whole conceit (again, one for Marcus central to both art and history) ends up just being “a cheap holiday in other people’s misery.”[8]
This then is the most pressing problem with respect to actual instances of immoral art.[9] That which makes a work intuitively morally odious can be tightly connected to what makes other works of art intuitively aesthetically excellent. As a result of this, one who takes moral odiousness and aesthetic excellence to be incompatible might be forced to have us radically revise our aesthetic judgments about whole epochs, such as Situationism, and whole genres such as blues, bluegrass, rap, and punk.
As we realize that some of our readership might not find this kind of wholesale condemnation of punk rock as problematic as we do, we should point out that the problem is also pervasive with respect to humor. Consider MTV’s television show Jackass, which contained some inspired skits that came out of performer Johnny Knoxville’s study Buster Keaton’s silent films. When Knoxville dresses up in an old-man suit and then uses slapstick to play against people’s expectations about old men, the results are often shocking and hilarious. And, as with Sacha Baron Cohen’s character in the eponymous Borat, much of the humor comes from people’s startled, usually initially good natured, reactions.
But there is a kind of sadism in laughing at the marks who think Knoxville’s character really is an old man. Other skits that employ this same dynamic make this abundantly clear. The ugliest scenes from Jackass don’t involve extreme sports stunts gone badly or bodily functions, but rather the ones where unsuspecting people thinking a baby is endangered because the cast members put an empty baby carrier on top of a car and drove away. But this is exactly the same dynamic that works so well with the other skits (and in Borat). People of good will are taken in and panic.
And this is a common problem with humor’s existential connection to cruelty.[10] Most of us will remember our mums telling us that certain things we found to be manifestly hilarious are not in fact funny. Was she correct? But in virtue of what is the person tripping in front of me not funny? How can that not be funny when Jerry Lewis manifestly is?
This is not merely an abstract philosophical debate concerning various definitions and isms. Rather, the problem goes to the heart of how we should engage with our own creative natures. If immoral art can be good art, what does that say about our obligations with respect to aesthetic practice and appreciation? We simply cannot answer this question until we have an account that does justice to the manner in which immoral art is often immoral not in spite of, but rather because, it effectively instantiates aesthetic qualities that we value with respect to art that didn’t initially seem immoral. Is this a valid sorites series, and if so should we should follow Plato’s advice to banish the poets? This is not just an issue with respect to artistic doppelgangers in far-away possible worlds, or crap-art like white power punk. If artwork can be immoral in virtue of aesthetically goodmaking features then our problem is a problem concerning what it is to be a human being.