Just a Gwai Lo - fun within prescribed limits

Alexander Nehamas: “it has proved impossible to establish the principles that govern the production of aesthetic pleasure. We have never found any features that explain why things that possess them create aesthetic delight. That is not simply because we disagree about beauty with one another, that you despise what I like while I find your tastes disgusting. I cannot even find such reasons for myself. Reasons are general. If a feature explains why something attracts me in one case, it should do so in all.”

But it doesn't, he goes on to argue: certain works, some bad and some beautiful, can share certain properties. In the beautiful works, those properties make them beautiful whereas those same properties make the work unenjoyable. It is instead the way the property is expressed that separates the beautiful from the crap.

He denies that if one rejects the notion that, for something to be beautiful, everybody must agree that the work is beautiful means that beauty is necessarily "subjective". Instead, he argues that if he finds a work beautiful, implicit in that is not only should those around him also find it beautiful, but some people already do find it beautiful, and that he is claiming membership in a community while at once also helping create that community of lovers of a work.

Beauty requires communication. Harold Bloom describes a solitary encounter, but like everyone who is in love with a book or a picture, he can't wait to tell us about it. In telling us about it, he participates in a community he is in the very process of creating. And those who are moved by his sense of the beautiful will respond in turn, in a never-ending conversation.

The album I've been most obsessed with, to the point of looking for it every time I'm in a record store—to see if it's still for sale in case my copy gets lost—is DJ Shadow's Entroducing...... The album made me listen to music in a different way than before. Before, if a song was catchy or had a clever hook or, for a while, claimed membership in a gang members from South Central Los Angeles, I'd buy the CD and feel proud of myself. After Endtroducing....., I demanded that an artist make a complete album with density in content and style, rather than throwaway pop crap (not that there's anything wrong with throwaway pop crap: that's what commercial radio is for). Soon, every album needed to have something that I didn't notice on the fifth listen, because I was too busy on the fourth playing catchup from the third, etc. (I've since learned to live with flawed albums.) Every now and then, there are things I notice for the first time in Endtroducing....., this after listening to it hundreds of times. (Only while writing this did I notice what sounds like the voices of children in "Napalm Brain/Scatter Brain".) There are better whole albums, no doubt, and DJ Shadow did not and will not necessarily revolutionize the music industry, but a community based on shared interest, primarily the In/Flux email list but also the people that flag me down because of my T-shirt—I freely admit to being a fanboy—wondering if I went to the concert where he opened for the Chemical Brothers (yes, by the way, and get this, I didn't even stick around for the featured act!). DJ Shadow is the only artist I'd recommend with evangelical zeal to someone who hasn't heard his stuff, because, well, I think even though he's long finished the album, “the more we come to know the beautiful thing itself, the more we come to know other things as well.” The In/Flux started out, as history serves, a mailing list to discuss the artist and his art, but it quickly became both that and a forum for his fans to discuss what they liked in music generally. (I probably would never have heard of the funk band Soulive if it weren't for that, and now I have more than a dozen discs of their live stuff.) The list rarely strays from that mandate of talking about music, but there have been some impassioned debates, like did DJ Shadow sell out for scoring the Reebok commercial (probably, but a brotha's gotta eat) and hey, is this beat that I made last night, what do you guys think? Endtroducing..... may not be the best record ever produced, but it was the first one that forced me to demand more bang for my buck.

Another way I look at the above highlighted quote critiquing Bloom's conception of enjoying the beautiful as a solitary act is the sense that, while in university, writing papers and preparing presentations and the like—especially, by definition, if it's not group work—seemed on the surface to be a solitary act. But we students were engaged in a process of learning from people both alive and dead, and, more importantly, engaging in the conversations that were happening around us by producing works of our own. Rather late in the process—but thankfully at the beginning of upper level studies—did I learn that way of thinking about my education and that (coupled with a practical course in analyzing arguments) is the major reason for my later success academically.

I've only commented on a small part of Nehamas' argument. Those who have seen the movie Beautiful Girls will hear the echoes of the mini-speech by Paul, who had cut out of fashion magazine photos of supermodels, explain why he has them plastered over his wall. They will also see similarities in what Steph said: she has “always judged a film by how it remains in my memory a day or two later”, which, oddly, is how I judge movies too. More specifically, the better the movie, the more likely I think about what life must have been like for the principal characters if only the movie had gone on longer. The more I want more, to me, the more beautiful a thing is.