The Difficulty with DifficultyAuthor(s): David NovitzReviewed work(s):Source: Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 34, No. 2 (Summer, 2000), pp. 5-14Published by: University of Illinois PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3333572 .Accessed: 13/09/2012 00:15

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The Difficulty with Difficulty

DAVID NOVITZ

Noel Carroll's approach to the nature of mass art has both a negative and a

positive component. Negatively, it offers a sustained critique of what he calls the Elimination Theory of Mass Art. More positively, it offers an origi- nal, comprehensive, and elaborately defended philosophical theory of mass art.1

Carroll's decision to treat mass art as a topic worthy of serious philo- sophical attention is to be commended. It forms part of a sustained attempt to extricate Anglo-American aesthetics from its long-standing love affair with the fine arts. In so doing, it rightly urges on us the importance of those less rarefied art forms that are to be found on television, in the cinema, pulp fiction, and magazines-and that are so much a part of our ordinary lives. These, after all, are the works of art that most influence the average person's ideas, attitudes, and behavior, and that instill tastes, fashions, and crazes.

The philosophical credibility of Carroll's enterprise, however, depends in large measure on its explication of the notion of mass art, and it is with this core theoretical component of his recent book that I take issue. As he

notes, I have once before raised doubts about his treatment of these mat- ters.2 His response to my criticisms in an earlier article, his more recent amendments and preemptive comments, and his extended discussion of some of the key concepts deployed in his theory have eased certain of my worries (PMA, chap. 3). But others remain, and new problems have arisen in the wake of the old. It is these that form the focus of this essay.

The Elimination Theory of Mass Art

Although I do not propose to say very much about Carroll's criticisms of the so-called Elimination Theory, it is important to understand what his criticisms are designed to achieve. 3 As he explains it, the Elimination

David Novitz is Reader in Philosophy at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. He is author of Pictures and their Use in Communication, Knowledge, Fiction, and Imagi- nation, and The Boundaries of Art, as well as many articles in aesthetics and ethics.

Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 34, No. 2, Summer 2000 ?2000 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

6 David Novitz

Theory attempts to account for mass art in terms of social classes and asso- ciated social interests rather than in terms of purely structural or formal features of artworks (PMA, 176-78). Hence, on his view, the Elimination

Theory maintains that

there are no formal features that distinguish popular art or mass art from other sorts of art...the distinction between popular art (or mass art as the relevant subcategory of popular art), on the one hand, and high art on the other hand, has no structural, functional, formal, or ontological basis. Rather, the distinction is really a class distinction (PMA, 176).

Any such move, Carroll thinks, must be wrong. He believes, and attempts to defend the belief, that there are and have to be formal properties or struc- tures that distinguish mass art, and this is why he considers it important to combat what he calls social reductionist explanations of the phenomenon.

An odd feature of Carroll's discussion of the Elimination Theory is that it is centered not on mass but on popular art. Ostensibly, this is because mass art is seen by him (on occasions at least) to be a subcategory of popular art so that that any theory that shows that popular art cannot be distinguished in terms of its formal properties will establish that mass art cannot be dis-

tinguished in this way either (PMA, 176, 199). But it is an easy matter to show that this does not follow; that even if popular art is amenable to a social reductionist explanation, it need not be the case that mass art is

similarly amenable. Take the following example. It is beyond dispute, I think, that the fact

that a person is a monarch can only be explained socially. It is also beyond dispute that monarchs who have warts on their noses form a subcategory of the larger class of monarchs. It plainly does not follow from a conjunction of these two suppositions that we cannot distinguish members of the sub-class in question-namely, monarchs-with-warts-on-their-noses-in terms of certain formal or structural features. We can, provided that we

already know that they are monarchs. From this it follows that there simply is no need for Carroll's tirade

against social reductionist theories of popular art. As Carroll suggests, mass art may always be popular but even if there are no intrinsic proper ties that

distinguish the popular arts, it certainly does not follow that there are no in- trinsic properties that distinguish mass arts. This is why Carroll's claim that one can distinguish popular art in terms of the formal features of mass art must also be wrong-simply because one cannot straightforwardly infer the identifying features of a set from the identifying features of any of its subsets (PMA, 183). A vital identifying feature of the subset of warty-nosed monarchs is the physical presence of warts on their noses, but this feature tells us nothing about the identifying features of monarchs in general. In the same way, the sorts of things that make mass art popular need not be the sorts of things that make them mass.

Difficulty with Difficulty 7

So nothing that Carroll says against social reductionist explanations of

popular art is strictly relevant to his claim that there are formal properties in terms of which to distinguish mass art. The fact is, of course, that no one has ever seriously argued that mass art lacks formal identifying features- and this, perhaps, is one reason why he directs his discussion in the early part of the third chapter to social reductionist accounts of popular art such as my own-although if it is my theory that he has in mind, he does not seem to do it justice.4 Here he writes of "popular art or mass art" as if they are or could be amenable to the same sort of analysis-something that I never suggest. His reason for doing so is that many examples given of pop- ular art are also mass art, but although he is correct about this, there many types of popular art-limericks, ditties, schoolboy erotica, music hall,

breakdancing, the foxtrot, and the waltz (just to mention a few)-that are not mass.

What is surprising and seemingly muddled about all of this is that while Carroll runs these two notions together in the first part of chapter 3-there

regarding mass art, at least for the purposes of his discussion, as "a subcat-

egory of popular art" and telling us (much more emphatically later on) that "mass art is popular art, but a noteworthy subspecies, distinguished by its

dependence on mass delivery systems" (PMA, 176, 199)-he also tells us that "perhaps the most misleading way to label [mass art] is to call it popular art" (PMA, 185). Why, then, the earlier claim that theories of popular art such as mine are in effect theories of mass art, even though I have denied that they are?5

The Origins of "Difficulty"

I have mentioned Carroll's critique of what he calls the Elimination Theory of Mass Art not just because it seems misplaced, but also because I am not convinced that his positive account of mass art manages to elude the social reductionist explanations he wishes to avoid. For in order to establish that mass art is distinguished by formal or structural properties it is not enough to show that it cannot be reduced just to class relations; one has to show that social or cultural considerations play no part at all in distinguishing the

genre. This, I shall argue, is something that Carroll is unable to do; that the so-called structural features he isolates as necessary for mass art are closet so- cial features, so that in this respect his theory constitutes a social reductionist

explanation of the phenomenon. On his view, x is a mass artwork if and only if

(1) x is a multiple instance or type artwork; (2) it is produced and distributed by a mass technology (elsewhere referred to as "a mass delivery technology" (PMA, 224); (3) it is intentionally designed to gravitate in its structural choices (for example, its narrative forms, symbolism, intended affect, and even its

8 David Novitz

content) toward those choices which promise accessibility with mini- mum effort, virtually on first contact, for the largest number of untu- tored (or relatively untutored) audiences (PMA, 196).

Each condition is deemed to be necessary for mass art; collectively they are considered sufficient. The third condition is rightly regarded by Carroll as being of primary interest. According to it, mass art requires, and is partly distinguished by structural choices that result in formal or structural prop- erties, which, in their turn, promise ease of comprehension. If this is right, it follows that any attempt to explain mass art in terms of social rather than structural or formal properties-in terms, that is, of what Carroll calls the Elimination Theory of Mass Art-must be wrong.

On his view, then, there are structural choices-hence certain struc- tures-that help distinguish mass art. And while such structures may vary from work to work, they are invariably ones that are intentionally designed to promote a ready grasp of the work on the part of the "the largest number of untutored (or relatively untutored) audiences." In other words, they are structures that call on no specialist understanding, and so are virtually trans-

parent to those who view the work. Avant-garde art, by contrast, is always "difficult"-often intentionally so-and since "difficulty is arguably a formal characteristic of an artwork" (PMA, 182), the avant-garde is also taken by Carroll to have structural features (or formal characteristics) that distinguish it from popular or mass art.

I have elsewhere criticized a good deal of this on the grounds that diffi-

culty and ease of comprehension are determined not just, if it all, by struc- tures or formal characteristics but by available cultural knowledge. Carroll has adapted his theory in some respects, but still seems to me to miss the force of my criticisms.6 The claim that any mass work of art is necessarily designed to be accessible, and so contains structural features that promise to make it accessible to "untutored audiences" is straightforwardly wrong.

For example, there can be no doubt that perhaps all of Shakespeare's plays appealed in idiom and in humor to what the common people of his

day would easily understand. They invoked a shared vocabulary, shared

values, and a shared cosmology-and, in this way, were designed to reach as large a viewing audience as possible. The structures that many in an Elizabethan audience would have found accessible, "virtually on first con- tact" are not structures that someone in a different culture and time would find accessible. Carroll concedes as much when he says "that degrees of ac-

cessibility may change with history," and he rightly points out that this fact "does not challenge the claim that mass art gravitates toward what is most

accessible, where accessibility is time-indexed" (PMA, 229). What Carroll does not take from this sort of example and does not prop-

erly consider, is the fact that there are very few, if any, structures or structural choices which in and of themselves will have any particular significance,

Difficulty with Difficulty 9

and which in and of themselves will be easy or difficult to understand. Let me stress that the point of this observation is not (as Carroll supposes) to

challenge the idea that mass art always gravitates toward what is accessible

(which I challenge later and in a different way); it is to challenge the claim that there are structural features of artworks that by themselves promise ease or difficulty of comprehension and that enable us to distinguish mass from avant-garde art.

While there are undoubtedly works of art that are easy and others that are difficult to understand, what makes them so in an overwhelming num- ber of cases are not the shapes or sounds or structural and formal properties of those works. For the significance that such shapes or sounds or proper- ties have, and how easy it is to grasp their significance, is almost invariably a function of the cultural conventions that govern their use. The signifi- cance of any work-if by that is meant its semantic properties-are cultur-

ally emergent. They are not natural properties, which is what they would have to be if difficulty or ease of comprehension was a function solely of the structural properties of a work. Hence, even if we allow that what Carroll calls "difficulty" is in fact necessary for avant-garde art, and that accessibil-

ity (or the promise of it) is always necessary for mass art, neither are formal

qualities of the work-if by that is meant intrinsic structural qualities of the work. Such features are culturally emergent; they require certain cultural conventions which make particular arrangements of marks or sounds difficult or easy to understand.

The only structural qualities of works of art that are by their very nature

easy to comprehend, are those, if any, that we are "hardwired" to under-

stand-properties that the evolved structure of our brains equips us to un- derstand. This is why Carroll is so eager to enlist pictures in the service of mass art (PMA, 192-93). But a good deal of what Carroll regards as mass art is not pictorial-and it is doubtful, in any event, whether our ready under-

standing of pictorial works of mass art can be explained solely in terms of the inherited architecture of the human mind. Carroll writes as if pictures are entirely transparent, and as if our grasp of cartoons and the movies is never a product of acculturation. But the matter deserves much more atten- tion than he gives it. It may be true that humans are hardwired to recognize certain pictures-the picture of a face, for instance. But it seems unlikely that we are hardwired to recognize a picture of a face as servile rather than

imperious, pious rather than irreverent, or as modest rather than proud. Here it seems that a good deal of the significance of a pictorial work of art

depends on "tutoring" of one sort or another-although, in fairness to

Carroll, it is not yet clear that the "tutoring at issue involves training in spe- cialized background knowledge" (PMA, 227). It is the absence of a need for such specialized tutoring, he thinks, that is necessary for mass art.

10 David Novitz

But what Carroll fails to recognize is that ignorance is unevenly distrib- uted throughout any given population, so that some people will require specialized training in order understand an artwork that others understand with relative ease (PMA, 228). It is of no avail to insist as he does that the issue is not about what individuals can understand but "about what masses of untutored people find easily accessible" (PMA, 228). My claim is pre- cisely that there is no undifferentiated mass of untutored people. There are old and young people, Jews and Catholics, Marxists and capitalists, femi- nists and born-again Christians, Islamic fundamentalists and new-right economists, all of whom approach the same work with different beliefs, val-

ues, and expectations. Hence what one group within this epistemically dif- ferentiated mass finds "difficult" in a work of art, another will often find

"easy." As a result, some groups will need "specialized tutoring," while others will not, so that it is simply not clear how the need for "specialized" tutoring helps us to distinguish mass from avant-garde art. There is no "mass" understanding of art-if by that is meant a work of art that all

people in all cultural situations will be able to understand by virtue of their

being human. Carroll needs to do much more work to show that difficulty and ease of

comprehension are structural or formal properties of a work. My argument suggests that in an overwhelming number of cases, comprehension has to be explained socially. If this is so, the one so-called formal quality that Carroll marshals in order to distinguish mass from avant-garde art would seem to require a social explanation-so that he has not, after all, eluded the social reductionist account of mass art that his attack on the Elimination

Theory was designed to achieve. More precisely, he has not shown in the third condition of his theory that mass art is distinguished by a formal or structural quality that ensures ease of comprehension.

Is Mass Art Always Easy?

The difficulty with "difficulty" does not end here. According to Carroll, "mass art gravitates toward what is most accessible" and is designed for mass consumption. Avant-garde art, by contrast, is "difficult" and is not de-

signed for mass consumption (PMA, 189). There is something amiss about this way of drawing the distinction.

One part of the problem is this: a good deal of what is commonly termed mass art is inaccessible to many people, and what is more, is designed to be so. Heavy metal music would seem to be a case in point, since many older

people claim to be unable to understand what it is all about. But Carroll wonders whether it is

really inaccessible, rather than simply distasteful to my students' par- ents. These oldsters could simply comprehend it without putting

Difficulty with Difficulty 11

very much mental energy into it, even if they didn't like it. In fact, many of these parents may really comprehend it, and that may be the very reason that they dislike it (PMA, 205).

Perhaps this is true of some who respond negatively to heavy metal music. Others, however, do not have any idea of what to listen for in the ca-

cophony and blare of sounds, so just do not understand it-and, for reasons that will soon become apparent, the music does not guide them in this matter.

More problematic, perhaps, is the fact that Carroll assumes an account of what it is to understand a work of mass art without properly articulating, let alone defending it. He claims later on, however, that "eliciting the ap- propriate emotional response from the audience is generally a condition of

comprehending" a work (PMA, 249). Here Carroll and I are in agreement, although, if this is his view, it does create problems for his account of the

accessibility of mass art.7 Take, by way of example, a movie like The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which almost everyone would regard as a pretty obvi- ous example of mass art. Perhaps because it is a celebration of values that are foreign to an older generation of viewers, many fail to delight in those scenes of bisexuality, seduction, deception, and cannibalism that were in- tended to be refreshingly open, liberating, and plain good fun. As a result, older people have by and large failed to grasp the humor of the film, and so have lacked an appropriate framework or mental set in terms of which to

interpret, respond to, and evaluate it. They miss the humor, hence the sig- nificance, of large sequences of the movie. In a perfectly ordinary sense, then, Carroll ought to agree that the work is not accessible to them; that

they do not properly understand it. It is not merely (as Carroll supposes) that some mass art is "customized"

for a limited audience in the way that science fiction is. Nor is it the case that "in terms of basic stylistic choices," The Rocky Horror Picture Show and

heavy metal music are of a piece with "what would be shown on a comedy channel and what would be shown on a science fiction channel" (PMA, 206). If one does not take a kind of iconoclastic pleasure in the jarring sound, the tearing vibrations, and gut-jolting rhythm of heavy metal music, one simply has not understood what it is all about. And if one does not take

pleasure in the celebration of uninhibited sex, the seduction and corruption of Brad and Janet, the gyrations of Frank N. Furter, and the eating of poor Eddie, one has missed the point of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. It is not that one has understood it and found it wanting; one simply has not

grasped it at all. It is this failure of understanding on the part of parents and moral

guardians that makes heavy metal music and films like The Rocky Horror Picture Show especially valuable to those who are trying to forge an identity that distinguishes them from an older, more powerful generation. There is

12 David Novitz

method in this madness. Some of these works of mass art are deliberately designed to exclude, and so to be inaccessible to, certain groups of people. They mark their adherents off in a visible way from the staid crustiness- from the values and the way of life-of their elders and betters. Mass art, in other words, is sometimes used as a banner in terms of which to forge and

parade an identity, but it can achieve this only if it is designed to be inacces- sible to certain groups who fall beyond its pale, fail properly to understand it, and so become a foil relative to which new identities are forged.8 Nor is this particularly rare. It is not just cult movies, novels, or postmodern music that achieve all of this. Political cartoons are a form of mass art that are of- ten explicitly designed to be accessible only to those who already subscribe to a particular ideology that the cartoons then seek to celebrate and rein- force. If one does not already subscribe to certain values and beliefs, one is excluded by the cartoon, and one straightforwardly fails to grasp its humor and its insights. Those who do grasp it however are part of an in-joke, and find support for their cause as well as group solidarity through the intimacy of their shared humor.

While Carroll recognizes that "mass art is one of the major means through which ideology is communicated," he fails to recognize that it often achieves this by deliberately designing the art work for a special audience (PMA, 362). So while one might understand aspects of the anti-Jewish, pro-Aryan and Nazi cartoons in the 1936 volume of Die Stiirmer, one is not likely to

grasp their wit, still less their wisdom or their sense of triumph unless one also shares a certain world view, a certain set of values, and certain aspira- tions. Importantly, these cartoons are not designed to convey this world view to those who do not already possess it. On the contrary, the cartoons seek to celebrate a shared vision and in the process forge group loyalties, a sense of rightness and belonging. They are deliberately designed, therefore, to be inaccessible to those who do not have the appropriate beliefs.

And yet, if anything counts as mass art, cartoons in Die Stiirmer, heavy metal music, and The Rocky Horror Picture Show must qualify. Yet none of these is designed to be generally accessible. Not one satisfies the third condition of Carroll's theory of mass art.

Is Avant-Garde Art Always "Difficult"?

Nor are things much better when it comes to Carroll's characterization of

avant-garde art. For, as I shall now show, what Clement Greenberg and Carroll call "difficulty" is not always, and certainly need not be, a mark of the avant-garde.

A comment made to me by one of New Zealand's foremost avant-garde artists, Don Peebles, suggests as much. He was greatly taken with a conver- sation that he had with a little boy who attended his recent retrospective

Difficulty with Difficulty 13

under duress, having been dragged there by his art-loving mother.9 Turning to the artist, the boy had asked, wide-eyed, "Gee, Mister, did you do this?" And when Peebles answered in the affirmative, the boy had responded with an awe-inspired "Wow!"

According to Peebles, this was the response that he wanted and that his work is intentionally designed to elicit, for at least in his later period, his

paintings and collages (he insists) are meant to stand naked to the viewer. On his view, there is very little more to his work than what you see, and it is meant to reach you as directly as possible, to impact on your nerve endings and pleasure centers, and to make you feel the "wowness" that the young boy had so deftly articulated.

It is true, however, that those who are embedded in the prevailing cul- ture of painting and sculpture are prevented from experiencing Peebles's works as he intends them to be experienced. Such viewers have expecta- tions that are far more complex and difficult than the works themselves, and so tend to look for meanings, intentions, and formal configurations that are not there. What we have from Peebles are artworks that are plainly ahead of their time-and, in this basic sense, avant-garde. But they are not difficult in Carroll's sense of this term, for the less you know about painting and sculpture, the less "tutored" you are, and the more likely you are to understand and take delight in them. This is avant-garde art that is not "difficult" in the specified sense, and certainly is not designed to be so.

The only way in which Carroll can avoid this conclusion is to argue that Peebles's work is difficult relative to the culture of painting that now pre- vails. But any such move seems closed to him if, as is the case, he also wishes to resist social reductionist explanations of avant-garde and mass art. For to argue in this way would be to concede that difficulty is not a function of the structures or formal qualities of a work, but a function in- stead of prevailing cultural conventions. And this is precisely the view that his attack on the Elimination Theory of Mass Art is designed to undermine.

Conclusion

Avant-garde art need not be difficult; nor, we have now seen, need mass art

always be easy. I have tried to show that whether they are difficult or not

depends not on the formal features of works of art but on the cultural un-

derstandings that one brings to these works. This is why Carroll's attack on the Elimination Theory of Mass Art misses its mark. Its object was to show that since Mass Art cannot be explained in terms of social classes and their associated interests, there must be certain formal features or structural

properties that distinguish it. But such features, we have seen, far from be-

ing purely formal, have to be explained socially-so that Carroll's move

14 David Novitz

against social reductionist explanations of mass art (at least as evidenced in the third condition of his theory) simply fails.

Certainly the movie Titanic is more easily understood than James Joyce's Ulysses, but even Titanic contains details and aspects that a largely untu- tored audience will not grasp. After all, it is the story of the sinking of an actual ship after collision with an iceberg; it is the story, too, of a privileged but oppressed woman (Kate Winslett) who falls in love with a lower-class (but gorgeous) adventurer (Leonardo de Caprio). Just in order to under- stand this, one has to know about ships and icebergs, and preferably, too, about the history of the actual sinking of the Titanic. One needs, in addition, to have been exposed to those strands of feminism that explain how a woman of privilege and status can nonetheless be oppressed, and one needs to have some grasp, however minimal, of class theory in order to make sense of her on-board love affair and the distaste that some feel for it.

For all of these reasons, the third condition of Carroll's theory of mass art fails. Mass art is not always easy, will not always be understood without

specialized "tuition," and certainly is not distinguished by purely formal or structural qualities.

NOTES

1. Noel Carroll, A Philosophy of Mass Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). This book will be cited as PMA in the text for all subsequent references.

2. The relevant articles are Noel Carroll, "The Nature of Mass Art," Philosophical Exchange 23 (1992): 5-37; David Novitz, "Noel Carroll's Theory of Mass Art," Philosophical Exchange 23 (1992): 39-49; and Noel Carroll, "Mass Art, High Art and the Avant-Garde: A Response to David Novitz," Philosophical Exchange 23 (1992): 51-62.

3. I have done so in Novitz, "Noel Carroll's Theory of Mass Art," 39-43, and have only very little that is new to add.

4. The relevant article is David Novitz, "Ways of Artmaking: The High and the Popular in Art" The British Journal of Aesthetics 29 (1989): 213-29, which Carroll treats as a theory of mass art. See his criticisms of this article in Carroll, "The Nature of Mass Art," 8-13; and my response in Novitz, " Noel Carroll's Theory of Mass Art," 39-43. See, as well, his remark on this debate in Carroll, A Philosophy of Mass Art, 176, note 1.

5. See Novitz, " Noel Carroll's Theory of Mass Art," 42-43. 6. Ibid., 45-47. 7. See, for example, David Novitz, Knowledge, Fiction, and Imagination (Philadelphia:

Temple University Press, 1987), chap. 4. 8. For more on the ways in which art can be used to forge an identity, see David

Novitz, The Boundaries of Art (Philadephia: Temple University Press, 1992), chap. 6.

9. See Justin Paton, Don Peebles: The Harmony of Opposites (Christchurch: Hazard Press and The Robert MacDougall Art Gallery, 1996).