What follows is a guest post by Andrea Lorenzo Baldini(Nanjing University) talking about the life and philosophy of the recently passed Joseph Margolis(Temple University)
The philosopher of art Joseph Margolis passed away on June 8th of this year. I received the news about his passing while I was riding the subway on my way to a meeting with one of my students. The sad update was mentioned in an email that a common friend sent to me. Joe, as we usually called him, was 97 years old, born on May 16, 1924. He received his PhD from Columbia in 1953, where he met – among others – the influential philosopher and art critic Arthur Danto. He started teaching at Temple University in 1968, and would never retire.
What follows is a guest post by Saam Trivedi. Saam was educated at universities in the US, England, and India, and is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. He has published articles on such topics in Aesthetics as interpretation, musical expressiveness, ontology, Tolstoy’s aesthetics, and Indian aesthetics in such journals as Metaphilosophy, Revue Internationale de Philosophie, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, British Journal of Aesthetics, Journal of Aesthetic Education, and also in edited anthologies.
Not being an avid follower of all the exciting things going on in the blogosphere, I honestly do not know who regularly reads this blog (and my ancient laptop’s spell-checker actually suggests “bog” and “blot” in lieu of “blog”). Still, as this blog is run by Christy Mag Uidhir, I assume that at least some regular visitors to it are his students. Accordingly, I offer below three minimal conditions for doing philosophical aesthetics, absent fulfillment of which, while you may well end up earning more than some people on Wall Street some day or even become a Distinguished Professor at some footling place, nevertheless it is quite unlikely you will uncover insights (not to mention “the truth”) about the arts and beauty.
Note that these three conditions or requirements do not form an exhaustive list of desiderata for doing Aesthetics, and readers should feel free to come up with other conditions in addition to these. And note that I am far from being the first to stress the first two of these requirements and I suspect I will not be the last; among many others, they have also been stressed before, if I remember correctly, by Clive Bell and Roman Ingarden (a philosopher by the way whose writings on such things as literature, music, ontology and the like we would do well to read more today, carefully and with an open mind, and getting past such quick and convenient labels as “Continental philosopher”, “phenomenologist”, “Polish” etc.). It is, however, the third of these desiderata that has not been stressed until now as much as it should be. So here goes.
1. Know the Arts
Of the many philosophers writing about the arts and beauty, there are some who are very good philosophers and who know a lot about other things in Philosophy outside Aesthetics, which they in fact bring to Aesthetics. This is very welcome, as should be evident from my discussion of the second condition below. However, when one reads and figures out their work, making one’s way through complex and often very clever arguments (not to mention jargon), one ends up ultimately learning very little about the arts and beauty. This is because their work is very far removed from the arts and beauty, something that is to be avoided. If memory serves right, writers such as Bell and Ingarden in fact urge that one know at least two different arts very well, and that is good advice we should all take to heart.
2. Know Philosophy
Let me begin my discussion of the second condition by narrating a true story. Some years ago, I attended a talk at an institution not too far from where I am based. A very well established philosopher (who does not do Aesthetics) prefaced a question by saying that in 50 years of doing Philosophy, he had not read even 50 pages of Aesthetics.
Indeed, even though Aesthetics (along with Ethics, Metaphysics, Epistemology, and Logic) is one of the five traditional areas of our discipline recognized by the American Philosophical Association (APA), most philosophers who work in other areas of Philosophy know and care very little about the arts and aesthetics, as exemplified by the story above. All that being said, however, I have actually heard many philosophers who work in branches of Philosophy outside Aesthetics sneer at the philosophical abilities of several aestheticians. Whether this disdain is justified is not something I will go into here, though I will mention that one very distinguished past President of the American Society for Aesthetics (ASA) once advised me at an ASA meeting some years back to talk more to metaphysicians and philosophers of mind, advice we would all do well to ponder. Indeed, if the kind of philosophers I mentioned in the previous section are one extreme, at the other extreme are some aestheticians whose writings are chock-full of wonderful examples from across the arts even though they are not the greatest of philosophers. It is, I would venture, necessary even if not sufficient for there to be more jobs in Aesthetics both (and these two things are not unrelated) that philosophers who work outside Aesthetics learn more about and respect the arts and Aesthetics, and also that aestheticians become better philosophers.
3. Explore Other Cultures
As you read what follows, ask yourself if this describes you or someone a lot like you or someone you know. You know all about music from Metallica to Miley Cyrus to Miles Davis, and the different kinds of music they exemplify. That is awesome! You might even know something about Monteverdi, Mozart, Milton Babbitt, and minimalism, and Western classical music more broadly (even though the audience for this kind of music is dwindling so much that if one sits in the last row at live concerts of Western classical music, one will see a sea of heads of gray hair or no hair, as someone I know once put it). But, you have never heard (or even heard of) Mongolian throat singing, or Mali’s great kora players, or Mexican mariachi music. And you are not even curious about such things; in fact, you could not care less.
Lest it be thought that my point above applies only to music, let me turn to film as another example, music and film being the two arts that most everyone experiences and enjoys at some point. Lately, I have followed some recent discussions of film and ethics.While the philosophical arguments of many writers on the topic are admirable, what is striking is the very small range of examples of Anglophone films and filmmakers that one typically comes across. All the usual suspects show up: Chaplin, Griffiths, Hitchcock, Welles, Ford, Kubrick, Malick, Scorsese, Spielberg, and others in the pantheon of Anglophone filmmakers. Don’t get me wrong here–I’d be the first to say these are all great filmmakers! But, really, is there nothing in the collective output of non-Anglophone and especially non-Western filmmakers to merit discussion when talking about film and ethics?
What about, to mention just a few examples, the great Japanese directors Yasujiro Ozu and Akira Kurosawa, or the Iranian filmmakers Abbas Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf, or the Indian director Satyajit Ray, or the Chinese Zhang Yimou and King Hu, or the Senegalese Ousmane Sembene, or the Brazilian Glauber Rocha, or the Turkish Yilmaz Guney? You could easily add to this list, less neglected non-Anglophone European filmmakers such as Melies, Renoir, Godard, Truffaut, Bunuel, Almodovar, Rohmer, Eisenstein, Tarkovsky, Kieslowski, Fellini, de Sica, Rossellini, Bergman, Lang, Riefenstahl, Fassbinder, and countless others. Some of these filmmakers make films that are indeed often set in cultures older than recorded Anglophone history, cultures that once flourished and then declined (and may rise again), cultures where ordinary folk these days often struggle with poverty, hunger, violence, corruption, political oppression, pollution, and disease, among many other things. Is there really nothing here for film and ethics, or are we collectively guilty of not being able to look very far beyond Anglophone culture?
I urge readers to conduct a similar exercise across the other arts (literature, painting, sculpture, photography, architecture, theater, dance, and so on), and also to notice something else. At the time of writing this, our little planet is estimated to have about 7.2 billion people. Of that, the total population of (majority) white or Caucasian Anglophone countries (the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) comes to something like 460 million people, and in fact less than 7% of the world’s population. Viewed in purely numerical terms and in numerical terms alone, those numbers are even lower than the numbers associated with apartheid, when a small minority (I seem to think the number was almost up to 20% in 1936) of South Africa’s population dominated the rest.
To conclude, we all know John Stuart Mill’s famous comparison (in the second chapter of Utilitarianism) between Socrates and the pig: unlike the pig who only knows his side of the question, Socrates knows both sides of things and so is able to compare intellectual and bodily pleasures. The true aesthete is like Socrates in that she knows both sides of these dichotomies: Anglophone art and aesthetics, and non-Anglophone art and aesthetics; Western art and aesthetics, and non-Western art and aesthetics. I leave it to your imagination to figure out what we should say about the pig. And if you disagree, think about this. Very often at conferences, you see middle-aged and older philosophers of my gender. Perhaps changing testosterone levels with the passage of time has something to do with this, but many of them are grouchy philosophers, the ones who misunderstand you first and then yell at you. Exploring the art and aesthetics of other cultures may well enrich your life, preventing you from becoming grumpy as you grow older, and getting you closer to attaining that elusive thing called work-life balance which philosophers, lovers of wisdom, probably need more than anyone else. Maybe this can even become part of our new year’s resolutions!
What follows is a guest post by Sherri Irvin. Sherri is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oklahoma. She specializes in aesthetics and the philosophy of art with strong interests in ethics and philosophy of race. She has written extensively on matters related to contemporary art and on aesthetic experience in everyday life and is currently working on two books, both under contract with Oxford University Press: Immaterial: A Philosophy of Contemporary Art, which argues for a view of the ontology of contemporary artworks, and Body Aesthetics, a multi-authored collection that treats the aesthetics of the body in relation to art, evolutionary theory, ethical considerations, race, age, gender, disability, sexuality and sport. Sherri is also a member of the editorial boards of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, and Philosophy Compass.
Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism editors Ted Gracyk and Bob Stecker have announced some changes to the journal’s editorial policies: “[B]eginning with issue 73.4, we will adopt a new citation policy. We will move from a system in which all citations are in endnotes to one with in text citations and a reference list. Like our recent addition of abstracts at the beginning of each published paper, this change generates greater transparency about the contents of articles. “However, it also supports the second change that we will introduce, which is that JAAC’s instruction to contributors we will include our support for the GCC 2 language (Gendered Citation Campaign). The new instruction reads: We encourage authors to check whether there are significant but under-recognized papers or books by women philosophers, or philosophers from other under-represented groups, which you might have overlooked so far in producing your paper and/or assembling your bibliography.”
In my work as a reviewer and editor, I’ve seen a number of aesthetics manuscripts that fail to acknowledge relevant prior work (both philosophical and artistic) by women and people of color. When I became the first female co-editor of the aesthetics section of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy last year, I noticed that only 5 out of 37 (13.5%) articles that had been commissioned by the aesthetics section since the SEP’s inception were by women. (I am one of 5 co-editors of the section. All the others are male, and all of us are white.)
These and other experiences have led me to be curious about the state of publishing in aesthetics, which has the reputation of being a particularly collegial and woman-friendly sub-discipline of philosophy. I decided to do some research about the gender balance of publishing in 3 major aesthetics journals since 2010, and also to query the editors about their policies and practices.[1] I focused on the two most prominent print journals, the British Journal of Aesthetics (BJA) and the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (JAAC), and the most prominent online journal, Contemporary Aesthetics (CA).
Data on Gender Balance for BJA, CA and JAAC
I collected information about the gender balance of the authors, referees, editorial boards and editorial consultants of BJA, CA and JAAC. I also collected information about the gender balance of membership in the ASA and BSA.[2]
Gender Balance of Published Articles
BJA and JAAC are quite similar regarding the gender balance of articles published since 2010, women have authored about 20% of the articles in each journal. The balance of CA is strikingly different, with 33.3% of articles authored by women.[3]
From the overall numbers, I broke out contributions to symposia and special issues, since these typically involve some pre-selected or invited contributors and thus may enable the editors of the journal or of the issue to have a greater influence on gender balance. I found that, as compared to the overall gender balance, women were somewhat more highly represented in symposia and special issues in BJA (at 25%) and CA (at 39.7%), with little difference from the overall ratio in JAAC (at 20.9%). Only 24 out of 139 (17%) total articles in BJA were in special issues or symposia, as compared to 29/93 (31%) for CA and 55/134 (41%) for JAAC.
At the suggestion of Ted Gracyk, co-editor of JAAC, I compared these numbers to the gender compositions of the professional organizations with which BJA and JAAC are affiliated. The British Society of Aesthetics (affiliated with BJA) has approximately 31.2% female membership, whereas the American Society for Aesthetics (affiliated with JAAC) has approximately 32.5% female membership (though I was unable to code for gender in about 1.8% of cases, so the actual number is probably a few tenths of a percent higher).
We thus have a situation where, in our two main print journals, women are very significantly underrepresented as compared to their membership in the affiliated professional organizations.
CA, on the other hand, is publishing work by women at a rate that closely mirrors their membership in these organizations (though it is not formally affiliated with either).
Gender Balance of Decision Makers
I also looked at the gender balance of the groups responsible for decisions about each journal or the articles to be published.
Both CA and JAAC publish lists of their referees. The referees for the last full publication year were 44.8% women for CA and 22.4% women for JAAC. BJA does not publish or maintain an annual list of referees and does not track the gender balance of its referees.
Women are currently well represented on the Editorial Boards of all three journals, relative to their membership in the ASA and BSA: 31.3% for BJA, 37.5% for CA, and 38.1% for JAAC. Both BJA and JAAC have made recent changes to their Editorial Boards that have increased the representation of women. (Full disclosure: I was recently added to the EB of JAAC.)
BJA and CA, but not JAAC, also employ a supplemental team of consultants to the editorial board. The BJAEditorial Consultants of BJA are 23.1% women[4] and the CAInternational Advisory Board is 50% women. (I omitted deceased members of the CA IAB, since I am interested in the gender balance of current decision makers.)
Editorial Policies and Practices
I asked the editors of all three journals to tell me about their review process and about specific efforts they are making in relation to diversity and inclusiveness.
According to the editors, all three journals employ double anonymity in their review process: the author and referees are mutually unaware of each other’s identity, but the action editor for the article typically knows the identities of both.
Elisabeth Schellekens, co-editor of BJA, reports recent efforts to improve the gender balance of the Editorial Board and Editorial Consultants. In addition, she and co-editor John Hyman have worked “to broaden the journal’s contents to include new or less mainstream topics or areas of research,” and they are now receiving more submissions in such areas. With regard to citation of work by women, Schellekens reports, “We have never made it conditional of acceptance that an article should contain references to female authors but, where possible, we have suggested them.” In addition, “It has always been a serious consideration in the choice of special issues and symposia that there should be at least a few possible contributors who are female.” She reports that, in her experience, women are significantly less likely to accept an invitation to participate in a symposium or special issue, but also significantly less likely to pull out once they have accepted such an invitation.
Arnold Berleant and Yuriko Saito report that CA does not have, in Saito’s words, “a specific policy or practice to encourage submissions from female writers and minority writers.” However, “our practice has been to support and encourage good works that address diversity of issues and approaches. We also specifically discourage those works in aesthetics that are relevant only to a narrow circle of professional philosophers/aestheticians – what Arnold refers to as ‘in-house debates.’ We make sure that the issues and discussion are accessible and relevant to general readers from different disciplines, including practicing artists. This also means that we consider submissions that do not use the typical philosophy/aesthetics vocabulary, methodologies, approaches, etc.”
In addition, CA has an editorial practice (though not formal policy) regarding authors whose first language is not English. Saito reports that Berleant “specifically tries very hard … to encourage works from non-English speaking authors whose language may need a lot of editorial work. As long as the content is there, we do not automatically reject submissions because of poor English. [Berleant] spends an inordinate amount of time and effort working with the authors to improve their writing. I think this adds to the cultural diversity of our collection.”
Berleant notes that CA’s only explicit policy related to diversity is this one, noted on the CA web site: “In order to ensure diversity of subject matter, approaches, and voices, papers by authors who have not published in Contemporary Aesthetics for at least a year prior to submission are normally given precedence.” He adds, “[O]ur commitment to diversity does not include explicit attention to gender, institution, or nationality.”
Ted Gracyk and Bob Stecker, co-editors of JAAC, have continued a practice initiated by previous editor Susan Feagin of collecting statistics on gender and geographic distribution of submissions and acceptances (see next section). They report, “JAAC’s mission as an interdisciplinary journal generates a duty to editors to be as inclusive as possible.” For acceptances, they rely primarily on peer reviewers, whom they select “according to two criteria: we do not ask anyone to review a manuscript if they’ve done a report for us within the last six months, and we prioritize peer reviewers who have themselves published peer-reviewed work on the topic of the manuscript.”
Gender & Geographic Balance of Submission & Acceptances in JAAC
Since July 2011, JAAC has been keeping figures on the gender balance and geographic distribution of authors who submit articles and whose articles are accepted. BJA and CA do not collect this information.
These figures reflect authors, not manuscripts. If an accepted manuscript had a man and a woman as co-authors, its acceptance is reflected in both the “women” and “men” columns.
It is notable that over the past three years, women authors have submitted to JAAC at a rate substantially higher than the rate at which they are published in JAAC from 2010-2014, and closer to the proportion of women members in the ASA. During 2 of the last 3 years, the acceptance rate for women has been lower than for men. Though the differences seem small (only 2-3 percentage points), another way of putting them is that in 2012-3, men were 21.4% more likely than women to have their manuscripts accepted, while in 2013-4, they were 11.6% more likely.
US submissions tend to be accepted at a rate slightly over 20%, while submissions from non-English-speaking countries tend to be accepted at far lower rates. There has been a steep upward trend over the past three years in the acceptance rate of submissions from English-speaking countries other than the US (which may, of course, be a statistical anomaly).
Conclusions
It is, of course, impossible to draw any conclusions about causation from these data. But a few things are notable. In the two most prominent print journals in aesthetics, the representation of women is significantly lower than the rate at which women belong to the relevant professional organizations. In JAAC, the rate at which women have been published since 2010 is lower than the rate at which they have submitted articles from 2011-2014.
A much higher proportion of the articles in CA are authored by women, as compared to both BJA and JAAC. It also has twice as many women among its referees (as compared to JAAC) and editorial consultants (as compared to BJA).
JAAC is tracking gender and geographic balance of submissions, acceptances and referees, while BJA and CAare not. BJA is actively trying to broaden the range of topics that the journal is understood to embrace. CA has since its inception embraced (and, in my judgment, effectively signaled that it embraces) diversity of topics, and has an editorial practice of fostering publication by authors whose first language is not English.
Further Research Directions
There are many questions that would be worthy of further study, including these:
1. How do the publication rates of women in these journals compare to the rates at which women belong to philosophy department faculties? Since some, and perhaps many, members of the ASA and BSA are not professional philosophers, it is difficult to be sure that the gender balance of the ASA and BSA is reflective of the gender balance of the profession (though I am aware of no special reason to doubt that it is).
2. How do other aesthetics journals, such as the Journal of Aesthetic Education and Evental Aesthetics, compare to BJA, CA and JAAC?
3. How does the gender balance of submissions and published articles vary from country to country?
4. Are there identifiable differences in the topics that women and men tend to write about?
5. How do the citation rates for work by women compare to those for work by men? This would be a very important next line of inquiry, given the evidence that women’s scholarly work is systematically under-cited (see here and here). Especially notable is Kieran Healy’s finding that in top philosophy journals, David Lewis is cited almost twice as many times as all women combined.
6. All of these questions need to be studied in relation to racial and ethnic minorities as well. Such research might require surveying people about their race and ethnicity.
Proposals
1. Publish bibliographies.
Given the evidence that women are systematically undercited, and the likelihood that scholars of color are as well, it would be valuable to take steps to improve the situation. Data about citation would be easier to collect if journals published bibliographies at the end of each article rather than just footnotes with embedded citation information. Bibliographies would also be easier for scholars and referees to scan if they are checking to make sure that relevant research by members of underrepresented groups has been cited.
2. Check for citations by women and scholars of color.
Authors, referees and editors should make a habit of checking to make sure relevant work by women and scholars of color has been cited. Editors could expressly instruct referees that this is among their tasks.
3. Work toward inclusion of women and scholars of color in symposia and special issues.
Editors and editorial boards should work to ensure that symposia and special issues are likely to have women and members of racial and ethnic minorities among their contributors. Those submitting proposals should address this, and editors and EBs can take this into account in deciding which proposals to accept. Those of us deciding which projects to undertake – what kind of books to edit, what special issues and symposia to propose, etc. – can consider topics that women and scholars of color are writing about, so that there will be a supply of people to collaborate on these projects with us.
4. Reach out to encourage scholars to submit their work and to propose symposia and special issues.
If editors become aware of a session that includes high-quality work by women or scholars of color, they can express interest in having particular papers or a symposium submitted for consideration. Cultivating relationships with scholars conveys to them that their work is more likely to be welcomed.
5. Look beyond non-standard English.
If we value diversity of topics, approaches and methods (as, I would argue, we should), and if we value the availability of excellent work from scholars around the world, we may need to make a special effort not to reject work based largely on linguistic infelicities.
6. Collect data about gender balance of submissions, acceptances, and referees.
I applaud JAAC for collecting and publicly sharing the data they have collected. Given that CA has a gender balance that seems to more closely reflect the gender balance of participation in the profession, this seems less urgent for them (though such information would still be useful, if only to allow us to gain more insight into what they are doing right). I hope that BJA will consider tracking these data as well. Given that editors can be subject to implicit bias regarding who comes to mind as a referee for a given paper, it would be useful to know how the gender balance of referees shakes out.
7. Use the double-anonymous evaluation system with care.
The editors of BJA and CAexpressed their opposition to triple-anonymous evaluation, and the editors of JAAC simply noted that they do not use this system. I understand the editors’ reasons for wishing to know the identities of authors and referees, and if I were an editor I, too, would want this information. But editors should be cautious about the possibility that, despite their best intentions, they may themselves be subject to implicit bias that affects the review process. They should also be alert to the possibility that implicit bias has affected a referee’s report: referees sometimes know the identity of the author of a work they have been asked to review (especially in a small discipline like aesthetics), and may infer or assume some aspects of the author’s social identity based on the content of the paper even if they don’t know the author’s name.
8. Reflect directly on these issues and formulate policies and practices.
The editors and editorial boards of journals that seem to be publishing work by women and scholars of color at a rate lower than that of their participation in the profession should reflect directly on how they might more effectively attract top quality work by members of underrepresented groups, so as to close the gap. I hope the above suggestions, and others that commentators will add below, will assist in this effort.
I am grateful to BJA editors John Hyman and Elisabeth Schellekens, CA editors Arnold Berleant and Yuriko Saito, and JAAC editors Ted Gracyk and Bob Stecker for answering my questions about their editorial practices and providing information to assist in my analyses. I would also like to thank Dabney Townsend of the American Society for Aesthetics (ASA) and Caroline Auty and Berys Gaut of the British Society of Aesthetics (BSA) for supplying information about membership in the ASA and BSA, respectively.
[1] I asked the editors of the journals to answer the following questions:
1. Does [your journal] have a formal policy or a set of informal practices that relate to diversity and inclusiveness in its content / authors / referees / editorial board / the works cited by its authors / the topics or authorship of symposia and special issues?
2. Do you keep figures on the gender breakdown of authors who submit papers and whose papers are accepted? If so, would you be willing to share them?
3. Does your review process employ triple anonymity?
4. Is there anything else you’d like me to know?
[2] All gender coding of items for this post was done by me, except in the case of BSA membership. My method of coding people as women and men was as follows. I relied on my knowledge of the gender presentation of people with whom I am personally acquainted. As a next step, I relied on first names where those names are used almost exclusively by people of one gender. For names not very strongly associated with a particular gender, I did internet searches for pictures indicating gender presentation and/or reliable references indicating gender. Where all of these methods failed, I did not code the person for gender. Non-coding occurred only for some of the ASA membership listings I received. I assume that this hybrid method of coding is associated with a small but non-zero error rate. I am not aware of anyone I coded having a gender identity other than ‘man’ or ‘woman,’ but if any recent authors, referees, editorial board members or editorial consultants who are represented in my data identify in this way, I hope they will inform me so that I can correct the data. I do not mean to erase other gender identities.
[3] I used a “fractional authorship” model: where articles have multiple authors, I gave each author credit for an equal fraction of the article. If an article was co-authored by a man and a woman, it was counted as .5 woman-authored. If we were to place articles with at least one woman author wholly in the woman-authored category, the numbers would be slightly higher:BJA: 22.3%CA: 34.4%JAAC: 21.6%
[4] This includes Anne Eaton, who has been mistakenly left off the masthead of the last two issues of the journal and whose membership in the EC is not yet reflected on the BJA web site.
Many of you may recall the previous discussion (here) about the near total absence in Philosophers’ Annual of articles dealing with issues in Philosophy of Art & Aesthetics. In response, many of you suggested AFB host its own annual recognition of outstanding papers in the field. Well, here you are.
A panel of nine judges were tasked with nominating what they thought to be particularly outstanding papers published in 2012 and 2013 (judges could not nominate their own work). From those nominations, five papers were selected for each year. I present to you…
The AFB Fab Flock Five
2012 & 2013!
The Fab Flock Five 2012
A.W. Eaton. Robust Immoralism.Journal Of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 70: 281-292.
Stacie Friend. Fiction as Genre.Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 112: 179-209.
What follows is a guest post by Bence Nanay. Bence is Professor of Philosophy and BOF Research Professor at the University of Antwerp and Senior Research Associate at Peterhouse, University of Cambridge. He is the author of Between Perception and Action (Oxford University Press, 2013) and editor of Perceiving the World (Oxford University Press, 2010) and he just finished his book on aesthetics, Aesthetics as Philosophy of Perception (Oxford University Press, under contract), all very elitist, really. This picture shows him pretending to be down with the kids, but the truth is that he has no idea how to play drums (as you can probably tell from the picture)… Also, he looks about as dumb on this picture as Kelso from That 70s Show(to throw in a really elitist reference)…
Let’s begin with a little quiz:
Who are the characters depicted in these following three pictures:
My conjecture is that even the sophisticated aesthetics-y audience of this blog can name the characters in the third, but not the first and the second picture (correct me if I’m wrong). (solutions below)
But we, aestheticians, like to use examples like the first and the second picture – and rightly so, they are amazing images. This raises the question about our audience: who are we talking to? To the connoisseurs of Domenico Veneziano and Antonioni? Or to what university administrators like to call the wider public? Aesthetics has an elitism problem and we all know this, but prefer not to talk about it.
I recently said in an interview that aesthetics as a discipline is considered to be marginal in the eyes of other philosophers (and got some heat for this from all kinds of directions). One of the reasons for this is exactly the perceived elitism of aestheticians – we go on about extremely highbrow examples like Proust, Bartok and Godard and most of our colleagues find it difficult to relate to this. And our students also find it difficult to relate to this.
But if aesthetics has an elitism problem, what can we do about this? I myself have tried all the strategies I could think of at some point or another in my life, and I’m really unhappy with each of them:
Ignore the problem. Just assume that your audience has as much background in atonal music and modernist cinema as you do. If they don’t, it’s their problem, maybe they’ll feel ashamed and go home to educate themselves.
Throw a bone to the crowd sometimes. When I served as a TA in Richard Wollheim’s 200-strong intro to philosophy of art class, one day he came to me enthusiastically, saying he will talk about an artwork the students can surely relate to – and then he talked about the Watts Towers in LA. The idea was that the student from Southern California are bound to love it. To Wollheim’s greatest amazement, the students were not particularly thrilled.
Try to educate the audience. I have to confess that I have done this quite a bit. Especially when teaching, which may be excusable. But this can be pretty heavy-handed. Once when I needed to use examples of the representation of dance in film (why? I’m not sure. Maybe something about the relation between the visual and the auditory?), I eased them in with the scene from Pulp Fiction, but then went on to do some Godard, Pasolini and even Bela Tarr. As I said, heavy-handed.
Go completely anti-elitist. Stop talking about high art altogether and focus on artforms and examples the audience can be expected to know and like – sitcoms, comics, punk-rock, street art, porn, horror, late-night talk-shows, whatever.
I would be genuinely curious to know who opts for which strategy – or if there are other strategies the readers of this blog can recommend. I don’t want to pretend that I have a solution to this issue of elitism – I don’t. But I really think this is something we, as a profession should talk about and take seriously.
The real issue is that I suspect that the problem of elitism goes much deeper. I have been mainly talking about choosing what examples one uses to demonstrate an aesthetic phenomenon. But there is an even more important sense in which we should address the issue of elitism within aesthetics – if we remain too elitist, we may miss out on genuinely important aesthetic phenomena that have become extremely widespread around us, but we failed to notice in our ivory tower.
And here comes the bombshell. I believe that no work in aesthetics addressed what is now the most dominant way of engaging with narratives and it’s called shipping. I talked to two or three dozens of aestheticians about shipping in the last year or so and not one of them knew what shipping was, so I can safely assume that you don’t either.
You are shipping a couple if you really really want two fictional characters of a serialized narrative fiction, mostly a TV show, to have a romantic relationship. The term itself was coined when the world was fascinated with the sexual tension between the two main characters of the TV show, The X-Files, Fox Mulder and Dana Scully. But it became a really global phenomenon with two extremely popular serialized narratives, Harry Potter and Friends (thus the illustration above)
Arguably, it were the writers of Friends who discovered that you can double, triple or quadruple the number of viewers if you manage to get them to ship a couple on your show – in the case of Friends, Ross and Rachel. Sitcoms before Friends didn’t use this trick. But after Friends it was not possible to ignore the shipping aspect of the genre. All the big sitcoms have been using it systematically – the more intelligent ones, like Community or It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia use it ironically or comment on the phenomenon on a meta level. (By the way, see what I’m doing here, in a blog post on elitism???)
But shipping is not only for TV show junkies. Probably the most visible shipper community is the Harry Potter fandom. What makes shipping in this context even more a question of life and death is that there are two (well, at least two) couples to ship: Ron and Hermione or Harry and Hermione. Here is J. K. Rowling’s account of her encounter with the phenomenon of shipping:
Well, you see, I’m a relative newcomer to the world of shipping, because for a long time, I didn’t go on the net and look up Harry Potter. A long time. Occasionally I had to, because there were weird news stories or something that I would have to go and check, because I was supposed to have said something I hadn’t said. I had never gone and looked at fan sites, and then one day I did and oh – my – god. Five hours later or something, I get up from the computer shaking slightly [all laugh]. ‘What is going on?’ And it was during that first mammoth session that I met the shippers, and it was a most extraordinary thing. I had no idea there was this huge underworld seething beneath me.
I’m not sure ‘seething underworld’ is the best way of thinking about this phenomenon. Harry Potter is somewhat atypical inasmuch as shipping had no visible effect on the books themselves (at least according to the author). But most serial narratives are radically transformed by the phenomenon of shipping. This is especially clear with TV shows. There are two characters in the sitcom How I Met Your Mother, Barney Stinson and Robin Scherbatsky, who seem to have good on-screen chemistry and this got the shippers going. The writers noticed this and turned the narrative in a way that lead the shippers along with the usual will they, won’t they play. The shippers became more and more vocal and more and more desperate. But finally Barney proposed to Robin and all was well – in the last season they got married and the shippers were extremely happy. But then the showrunners pulled a nasty trick in the finale – they had Barney and Robin divorced and got Robin together with the shippers’ grand enemy, Ted Mosby. The shippers were outraged, but, from a cynical financial point of view, this outrage came too late – the show was over, the ratings soaring throughout the last seasons. If the shippers burned their DVDs and merchandise, this did not really influence the show’s revenue…
This is a clear example for how shipping influences the actual work. But what is even more shocking (to me at least) is the way shippers engage with the work. To stick with the Barney/Robin example, you can have some taste of this from this shipping site, where you can find all kinds of delicacies, from the analysis of the symbolism of the trench-coats of the two characters to the hidden visual messageabout the love of Barney and Robin in a blue and yellow trashcan (not joking). Clearly, a lot of mental and emotional energy is spent on this.
How new is shipping? When you read the Flaubert book and want Frederic Moreau and Madame Arnoux to end up together, is that shipping? I don’t think so. What I take the main characteristic of shipping (and the most scary thing about it) is that all other considerations are deemed irrelevant compared to the interest in getting the shipped couple together. How I Met Your Mother has a certain amount of narrative complexity, at least for a work in its genre. But the shippers have no patience for that – whatever does not move the two characters towards each other is time and energy wasted. And once they are together, happily engaged, any narrative complexity is seen as a distraction from showing the two of them holding hands being happy.
The conclusion? There is no conclusion. While I am somewhat shocked at the effect of shipping on both our engagement with fiction and on the fictional works themselves, my aim here was not to make fun of it. Nor was my aim to urge all aestheticians to devote all their time to the systematic theoretical analysis of shipping. But I’m really puzzled by how our profession should approach phenomena like shipping. So this is not a ‘telling you how things are’ kind of post, it’s post I’m hoping to generate some discussion about elitism in aesthetics and ways of dealing with it and the phenomena it may restrict us from engaging with.
Solution to the quiz at the beginning: Saint Zenobius and the widow in Domenico Veneziano’s predella; Claudia and Sandro in Antonioni’s L’Avventura; Chandler Bing and Joey Tribbiani in Friends.
OUP Editor and Indie Rock Legend Peter Momtchiloff interviewed by Christy Mag Uidhir
Peter Momtchiloff has been philosophy editor at Oxford University Press since 1993. He studied classics at Oxford. He has played guitar in many bands, including Talulah Gosh, Heavenly, and currently the Would-be-goods and Les Clochards.Continue reading →
