Hearing the Contradictions: Aesthetic Experience,Music and Digitization

Aesthetic Experience

Hannah Arendt wrote that art works have the capacity of “arresting our attention and moving us” (2006 [1954]: 204). Indeed, the term “aesthetic” connotes the enlivened sensibility or heightened presence we can experience in relation to art. Similarly, John Dewey saw aesthetic experience as an “active and alert commerce with the world” (2005 [1934]: 18) and an opening to new possibilities of perception; that is, of seeing, hearing, and feeling. Sustained attention and engagement are not unique to art or divorced from everyday reality, as Dewey wrote, the aesthetic is simply “the clarified and intensified development of traits that belong to every normally complete experience” (2005 [1934]: 48). But many social philosophers have made the case for art as rich with the potential for this kind of experience because it is imaginative, mimetic or otherwise interrupts the routine, reified forms of experience most characteristic of modern societies.

For Theodor Adorno and many of his interpreters (such as Bernstein, 2001 and Dallmayr, 1997) aesthetic experience also provides a paradigm for ethical conduct, particularly in the encounter with difference. Adorno saw aesthetic experience as “a refuge for mimetic comportment” (1997 [1970]: 53) a receptive orientation that creates the potential for nonviolent, non-dominative relations between subject and object. As we encounter the aesthetic object, we are drawn into it but we neither merely succumb to stimuli nor remove the object from experience through the classifying procedures of formal reason. Mimesis is a form of “being with” rather than of mastery that, according to Nikolas Kompridis, can be understood in early critical theory as a form of “receptivity to the claims of the “other” (be it a person or a “thing,” a subject or an object)” (2006: 103). Kompridis himself conceptualizes receptivity as an active process in which “rather than willing something to happen, we allow ourselves to be affected by experience, allow ourselves to be decentered” (2006: 206). But receptivity is not merely openness to anything that comes along, in what would be a dangerous suspension of judgment. Rather, it is a form of normative agency in which we are called upon not only to let another voice become audible, but also to respond (2011). Beyond its clear ethical implications, Kompridis claims that receptivity also has a political dimension, as openness to change, to the possibility that things might be otherwise, is a foundation of critique.

Other philosophers, including Kant and Arendt (2006 [1954]), have made an explicit connection between aesthetic experience, judgment and politics. In this formulation, judgment is a type of response that is not intersubjective and intimate but public and performative and in these senses, political. As Arendt describes it, art is made in private for a public. It enters or appears in that shared world, one that its appearance also helps to constitute. As such, it provides an opportunity for critical judgment and discussion of the constitution of that world, or of the social forms of being-in-the-world, as Buck-Morss suggests. Art can also enter the world as rupture. According to Jacques Ranciere, the politics of art “consists in suspending the normal coordinates of sensory experience” (2009: 25) or the very terms of intelligibility or audibility that are common ways of being in a community. The irruption of art into the quotidian world of everyday experience can create a disturbance in the “distribution of the sensible,” the consensus of who or what can be seen or heard, by introducing “… into it new subjects and objects, to render visible what had not been, and to make heard as speakers those who had been perceived as noisy animals” rather than as persons possessing speech (Ranciere, 2009: 25).

In each case, aesthetic experience is a form of encounter that refers to a common world. That encounter may open up an agonistic space of judgment, persuasion or rupture, or an intimate one of receptivity and response. Aesthetic experience may at the same time interrupt the everyday, allow us to see and hear who or what may have been previously unintelligible, and signify non-violent ways of encountering others who are different. According to Dewey, “The moral function of art itself is to remove prejudice, do away with the scales that keep the eye from seeing, tear away the veils due to wont and custom, perfect the power to perceive” (2005 [1934]: 338).

Aesthetic Experience of Music

Of these general themes, two have been picked up in the sociological literature on aesthetic experience, music and collective life that have particular relevance for the digital environment. The digitized music world is characterized by the wide range of musics available, by its potential for the appearance and experience of difference. It is also a world, like the internet generally, of evaluation and judgment. Simon Frith’s scholarly and critical work on judgment as an element of the aesthetic experience of music will be a point of reference below. I want to begin by discussing David Hesmondhalgh’s eloquent work on music’s potential to promote commonality across difference.

Hesmondhalgh’s far-ranging project is to consider the ways in which the aesthetic experience of music may contribute to collective flourishing. Flourishing, as opposed to happiness, is not merely subjective but can refer to specific capabilities that are central to individual and collective well-being. He notes that Martha Nussbaum’s (2006, cited in Hesmondhalgh, 2013) list of such capabilities includes several that are pertinent to aesthetic experience, including being able to form attachments and to love; using the senses, imagination and thought; the ability to enjoy and to play; and affiliation. It is the latter that forms the normative ground of his argument regarding collective flourishing:

… affiliation, concerns ‘being able to live with and toward others, to recognize and show concern for other human beings, to engage in various forms of interaction.’ Another way we can build on Nussbaum’s approach, then, is to consider ways in which music might valuably enhance such interactions and our ability to live with and toward others. (2013: 20).

Hesmondhalgh argues that in this regard, the emphasis on “aesthetic talk” that he attributes to Nicholas Garnham (2000, cited in Hesmondhalgh, 2013: 136) and others is somewhat misplaced as it “provides only limited insight into the value of aesthetic experience.” In developing his argument, Hesmondhalgh draws on a distinction between sociable and deliberative publicness, where the former pertains to gatherings of strangers sharing the same experience, and the latter derives from the Habermasian notion of a political community grounded in citizenship and deliberating about the public good (2013: 85). Hesmondhalgh argues that it is not in deliberation but through sociability that we can most powerfully feel or experience something of our mutual dependence and obligation through music and this “aspiration to collectivity” can inform our contributions to political life (2013: 146).

But how, exactly, does the shift from the individual experience of music to collective ethics occur? What are the empirical grounds? Hesmondhalgh takes note of many forms of sociability with regard to music such as sharing concert experiences and playing music together that can promote a sense of commonality. But he is wary of attaching any of these activities to conceptions of “participation” or “community” that simply don’t obtain in complex modern societies. Nor, he claims, can we work from the ground of interaction and simply scale up: “In the sociology of music that derives from such interactionism, music becomes a model of the intersubjectivity that constitutes the social, collapsing the various domains of social life … into just one of these—situated activity” (Hesmondhalgh, 2013: 117). Instead, he suggests that we look at music’s potential contribution to collective flourishing institutionally and specifically on the level of the nation. In the adoption of formerly working-class, ethnic or minority musics such as tango (Argentina), son (Cuba), coastal music (Colombia) and samba (Brazil) by official state institutions, Hesmondhalgh sees instances of music’s ability to transcend ethnic and national particularism, provide a glimpse of genuine cosmopolitanism and breed commonality across difference (2013: 152) as these forms of music from marginalized groups come to symbolize an imagined or hoped-for national unity.

In Hesmondhalgh’s account, collective flourishing depends on “transcending or containing social differences” (2013: 130) rather than on the encounter with difference that art or music can occasion. In fact, he specifically cautions against the idea that we can move from an encounter with music as a template for interaction with others to any understanding of broader collective concerns. “Difference” is counter-posed alternately in his argument to commonality, community and solidarity, and identified with respect to social groups. At times it seems more a problem to be solved in order to have solidarity than an occasion to appear together and contest, argue, judge, act or simply be in the presence of others – some of the activities that might provide more than a symbolic type of solidarity as is the case with national musics.

While I am persuaded by many elements of Hesmondhalgh’s argument, I think we come to a better understanding of aesthetic experience, difference and collective life if we detach difference from social identities and conceptualize it instead as an element of our inhabiting a common world. Hannah Arendt’s (1958) work provides a model for this formulation. Arendt conceives of the “world” as a space of appearance and distinction. It is a space that is articulated through the objects of the world, including aesthetic objects that may have some permanence or at least duration (national musics would certainly fall into this category), and can occasion co-presence but also reflection and judgment about that world. That public reflection, judgment and persuasion, the agonistic or performative aspects of acting and speaking in the presence of others, is what Arendt defines as politics. It is a form of publicness that is at once sociable, deliberative and performative. Further, what happens in this space is that as we speak and act, we distinguish ourselves. Our judgments, responses, attempts to persuade others, or our embodied presence, are stories we tell about ourselves, revealing our singularity.

Hesmondhalgh argues that an important aspect of why music matters is “… its ability or otherwise to enhance feelings of shared experience, attachment, and solidarity towards other human beings” (2013: 87). Here I want less to debate this claim than to enlarge or redefine both of the terms. For in addition to valuing music for its solidaristic possibilities, we also value individual creativity, the unique voice, elements of originality that distinguish what we’re hearing from what we’ve heard before. In other words, we value its singularity because it is in its singularity that we recognize or experience something of our common condition as human beings. Pierre Bourdieu made precisely this argument in his call for a new internationalism in the arts, in a lecture in 2000. The artistic International has historically been composed of artists, writers or musicians from a variety of specific worlds who form literary or artistic circles in which their distinctness is the basis of their common experience as well as their interactions. This internationalism protects the autonomy of culture as well as the plurality of local worlds and practices that threaten to become de-differentiated by the consolidated economic, political and cultural powerbrokers against whom he railed. He concluded with the statement, “By defending their singularity, they are defending the most universal values of all” (2003: 81). In other words, we can arrive at some form of solidarity or commonality through music not only by overcoming difference but also by experiencing it.

Like Hesmondhalgh, Simon Frith has written extensively about aesthetic experience and the value of music. Judgment about popular music features prominently in his work, which debunked the now outmoded idea that popular music is commercial or social rather than artistic and therefore does not merit aesthetic judgment. On the contrary, he follows in the philosophical traditional of aesthetics in arguing that judgment is part and parcel of all aesthetic experience, “… listening is both hearing the sound and exercising judgment” (1996a: 259). But his work also draws on ethnomusicological sources where music is closely linked to collective forms of life. He suggests that popular music is similarly both embedded in and constitutive of forms of life in contemporary societies, in that it is a medium through which we situate ourselves in time and place and form our identities (1996a, 1996b). Its judgment also has both sociable and ethical dimensions. While Frith is more concerned with the criteria of judgment than with the activity, the sociable dimension comes out quite clearly: “Consumers’ everyday judgments (as against critics’ ‘considered’ views) tend to take place in noisy situations, in free-wheeling conversations about musical meaning and value …”(1996a: 71). In this regard, Frith comes close to Arendt’s conception of judgment as performative though he stops short of discussing how in these conversations we might reveal ourselves. The ethical is expressed in judgments of music as good or bad that are made not only with respect to formal musical properties but also to music’s suitability for specific situations, for expressing certain emotions, or with regard to its authenticity or sincerity. In other words, “…aesthetic and ethical judgments are tied together: not to like a record is not just a matter of taste; it is also a matter of morality” (1996a: 72).

Judgment about Music in the Digital Environment

Frith also tells us that the context of judgment matters, that we have to take the “social circumstances in which people make musical judgments in everyday life” into account (1996a: 52). What, then, of the digital context? The digital environment is nothing if not a space of appearance of both music and other people, and an agonistic, often competitive, space of distinction. It is also a world of judgment, filled with reviews of every conceivable service, product, government agency and cultural good, and with persistent incitements to comment, “like” or “follow.” What forms does aesthetic judgment take in this environment, and how do they bear on the aesthetic experience of music?

My initial research questions had to do with judgment, particularly how people make decisions about what to listen to, given the collapse of professional music criticism. That was a fairly straightforward question about “practices” that might contribute to the literature on digital discovery (such as Tepper and Hargittai (2009), whose research was conducted before streaming services came to dominate the digital landscape, or Nowak’s (2016) more recent study of how digital technologies shape consumption practices). But I also wanted to uncover something that I hadn’t seen in studies that were either quantitative or based on individual interviews; that is, how people speak about their experience of discovery, and how they express their judgments in the presence of others. To that end, JL Johnson and I conducted focus group interviews with 34 university students and young professionals in their 20s and early 30s in the Washington DC area. ¹ These extended interviews were exploratory and followed a theoretical sampling approach intended to uncover processes and generate analytical categories.

But what emerged about the experience of judgment shifted the research decisively away from my initial concern with discovery practices. I quickly learned that in an evaluative environment, one in which judgment is quantified and highly visible, where people are inundated with ratings and constantly asked to comment or post, they experienced the anxiety not only of making good choices but also of being judged. This was true even in the focus group setting, where respondents sought assurance that it would be a “judgment-free zone.” Respondents also struggled to reconcile the authority of quantified measures of popularity with their belief in the independence of their own judgments. Rather than reflective judgment in which individuals hope to convince others of their points of view, rather than “noisy, free-wheeling conversations about music,” judgment was experienced in this context as a threat, a power that seems outside ourselves and resulted in a generalized silence.

The contradiction between judging for oneself and relying on aggregated rankings was established very early in the interviews. All of our interviewees agreed that judgments should be one’s own. We asked if respondents ever read criticism:

Hostility to critics as experts or elitists is certainly not new, and as Raymond Williams noted in Keywords, “criticism” carries connotations of fault-finding and censure that would seem to give judgment and discrimination a bad name (1983). Respondents do rely on friends for music recommendations, people they know and trust. But at the same time that they turn away from expert judgment on the grounds of independence, or the judgment of anyone they do not personally know, most are guided by the far more anonymous quantified measures of popularity that are an inescapable part of the digital media experience. The ensuing struggle to reconcile the contradiction between independence of judgment and the power of quantization can become quite convoluted:

Casting the numbers as democratic in that their validity comes from “the people” rather than from “the experts,” is a strategy that works to preserve the sense of independent judgment despite the far greater authority that they seem to exert on listening choices and practices. Yet while respondents claim to be at least somewhat influenced by “everyone” or the “number of people,” or the “most downloaded” (all of the interviewees use quantitative rankings or ratings as they search for music), they’re rarely reading the comments in which discursive opinion might actually be expressed, using them instead as additional data points:

Despite the recognition that popularity is often not an indication that something is good, that the number of views may simply mean a video is a subject of curiosity or even derision, fear of being out of the loop if you don’t know what everyone is talking about runs quite deep. This anxiety may be a common one, particularly in this age group, and it is surely not new with the internet. But it takes a specific form with digital and social media, and studies of FOMO (fear of missing out) are proliferating (see those by the Australian Psychology Society, 2015 and researchers at the University of Glasgow, 2015). Under the harsh light of persistent quantification on the internet, the aggregated opinion of everyone confronts us at every turn. That kind of social pressure far exceeds what one might experience among friends or within social groups, as it runs across the entire connexionist world.

Under these circumstances, it is not surprising that judgment about music is largely tacit or private rather than sociable, deliberative, performative or public. The myriad opportunities for comment and evaluation online notwithstanding, not one of our respondents claimed to participate in doing so. This is also reflected on many music fan sites and other social media platforms where, despite the heavy traffic for information about releases and concert tickets, commenting is relatively sparse. In a digital world in which there is an incitement or at least an invitation to speak, the reluctance to do so is striking. Certainly, the difficulty of expressing emotional or affective responses to music is a factor. As one respondent put it, when you find good music, “there are no words for it. It’s like true love.” Others noted that it’s hard to describe the connection with music because that connection is more intimate, personal and meaningful. Revealing one’s musical preferences, then, can make us very vulnerable and generate anxiety that expressing our taste will make us vulnerable to the judgments of others – something especially true in the digital environment where the potential for anonymity often translates into a lack of accountability for how we speak. These concerns are clearly reflected in the comments here:

Judgment clearly accompanies listening to music but our interviewees experienced it in the digital environment as unpleasurable; fraught with contradiction, anxiety and risk. Their experience is part of a broader shift in cultural judgment that privileges quantitative ratings (such as top-ten lists and “listicles”) over discursive judgment in ways that alter not only the technical forms that judgment takes but also what judgment means as an experience we share with others. I am not claiming, and there is no basis to suggest, that the form that aesthetic judgment takes online replaces the more sociable forms it may take in other everyday situations. It is also the case that opportunities to consider our common forms of being-in-the-world do arise with respect to music, and occasionally spark engaged, serious debate online (the ongoing debate about whether or not Beyonce is a feminist is an interesting case in point). But there is a contradiction here that reveals another possible interpretation of the digital world as a space of judgment. That is, in this environment, expressing aesthetic judgment about music has become technically simpler yet substantively much more difficult to do.

Referring to Kant’s Third Critique, Buck-Morss reminds us that “… in the modern era, the definition of art was first posed in epistemological form, and the discourse presumed the necessity of critical judgments” (2003: 66). Aesthetic judgment is subjective but, in Kant’s conception, claims objective and even universal validity and it is on these grounds that it is also social, ethical or even political. Buck-Morss is hardly advocating a return to the terms or criteria of Kant’s aesthetics. But she does argue that if art is divorced from its critical epistemology, as she claims is the case in the contemporary visual art world, it is reduced to an ontology where it can be, but no longer matter. If aesthetic judgment is individual, subjective or an activity that takes place solely within communities of those we know, music matters less as an opportunity for engagement, for presence in and reflection on the common world.

Music and Difference in the Digital Environment

In the initial stages of my research, I thought of difference in terms of the diversity of music online and was curious how, given the collapse of professional criticism, individuals might be introduced to new and different types of music. But here, too, something else emerged about the experience of difference that caught my attention. In the context of personalization and the promise of a frictionless experience, discovery is oriented not toward what might be surprising, unsettling, new or different but toward the self – our moods, activities and memories. The expectation that this is possible, that music can be tailored to our immediate needs, produces impatience with anything that doesn’t “fit” and accounts for the inevitable disappointment so many of our respondents expressed. In these circumstances, difference is experienced not as a possibility but as a problem or a discrepancy, a failure to conform to the self. Just as the cultural form of judgment is shaped by quantization, the notion of difference so central to the ethical and social dimensions of aesthetic experience is redefined through personalization.

Music is a “technology of self,” “… an active ingredient in the organization of the self, the shifting of mood, energy level, conduct style, and mode of attention and engagement with the world.” (DeNora, 2000: 61). Participants in our focus groups, like those DeNora interviewed, commented frequently on how they use music to get themselves ready for activities and situations, using music to suit the mood, to alter it, or to manage or regulate emotional states. And the personalization of music through technology dates at least from the 1970s and the introduction of cassettes. But while personalization represents continuity with past practices, the expectation of a personalized experience signifies a profound change. Listeners expect to exert a far greater control over the listening experience than in the past, to have music accommodate their needs and, as Frith noted in his 2013 keynote address at the International Association for the Study of Popular Music conference, never to have to listen to any music they don’t like.

And yet everyone claims to have eclectic taste, to listen to “a little bit of everything.” In pursuing this seeming contradiction, I want to sidestep the issue of taste and the important literature that addresses it (such as Atkinson, 2011; Ollivier, 2008; Peterson and Kern, 1996 and many others) in the interests of asking a different set of questions about the understanding and experience of difference. Because what was startling to us was that when we probed further and asked people if they’d ever come across any music online that was really “different” they were uniformly at a loss. The fact that eclectic listening habits do not correlate with an experience of difference suggests that we need to look beyond, or perhaps beneath, the lists of genres or expressions of taste to the structures of intelligibility that organize the digitized music world.

In fact it is not genre – aesthetic categories with history or context – but moods and situations that provide the fundamental grammar of digitized music. More and more music is being delivered in the form of playlists geared toward specific activities (dinner party music, work-out music, etc.), that seem to obviate the need for, or desirability of, aesthetic or stylistic categories, and there are a number of popular apps that provide music according to the listener’s mood. Some industry executives have gone so far as to claim that genre distinctions are actually a hindrance to musical discovery (Manjoo, 2015). But genres are categories of difference in a way that mood or situation are not. They have history and invoke both social traditions and aesthetic conventions whereas moods or situations are transient and self-referential states or activities. Like all interviewees, Jess was asked to tell us something about the kinds of music she listens to and her comment is quite telling in that rather than mentioning types of music or genres, the referent is herself:

If listening is more firmly attached to mood than to musical genres or styles, then “eclectic” comes to stand in for the different versions or moments of the self. I can listen to anything, or have eclectic taste, because I am a person with different affective states, engaged in a variety of activities with which I want or need music to align. This is a personalization of the idea of difference, understood as an aspect of the self rather than different from myself, my frames of reference, identity, or memory.

There is nothing problematic or unexpected in the idea that music “has to speak to me.” When not talking about “fit” with activity or mood, respondents used the language of emotional connection to describe this experience and to describe good music. But what are the terms of the “connection” in these listening conditions, and what emotions are the basis of this connection?

In most cases, it is not a connection that draws upon some work of making a connection to the artist, of seeing or feeling something outside of one’s experience, but rather of having the self reflected back through the musical encounter, as described in the foregoing passage. If this seems too fine a point, we might refer back to Arendt’s description of aesthetic experience, that art works have the capacity of “arresting our attention and moving us” or of Ranciere’s notion of rupture. Being moved is not simply a reflection of my inner states but of being touched by something else, by the passion or emotion or sheer beauty of something other. It is in this way that the emotional connection of aesthetic experience can do more than reinforce my emotional state but rather just the opposite – to decenter, to transform, to temporarily throw it off balance. Not one of our respondents mentioned shock, surprise, or being unsettled as emotions that could be the basis of emotional connection. Rather, these are considered elements of disconnection and in the literal sense in that the unsettling or surprising are experiences respondents most often avoid with a click, “nexting” through song after song to find one that might fit.

And yet, the promise of personalization, of fit, is an illusion. As Eva Illouz’s (2007, 2012) work on modern romance deftly shows, the “architecture of choice” in the digital environment undermines the conditions in which it is possible to be satisfied, to find romantic or by analogy aesthetic fulfillment. For example, where in an earlier historical period the choice of marriageable partners was limited by locality and social ties, now digital technologies create the possibility of a virtually unlimited number of potential dating partners or mates. This has an impact not only on dating rituals but also on the nature of the emotions experienced as it becomes much more difficult to feel satisfied with any one person as there may always be someone “better” out there. The disappointment that her interviewees expressed with both the mechanisms of online dating and with the people they date had uncanny echoes in our focus group discussions. That disappointment takes two forms: either that listeners are constantly frustrated in their attempts to find music that “fits,” or disappointed that “discovery” returns them inexorably to themselves. The result is a form of musical anomie – the inability to be satisfied in conditions of limitlessness.

It is difficult to assess what this means, or what the consequences of this might be for aesthetic experience much less for questions of collective flourishing. But it is certainly hard to see the personalization of difference as a basis for solidarity or commonality. Adorno wrote (1997 [1970]: 246) “whoever experiences artworks by referring them to himself does not experience them.” In his terms, seeing the object solely through the subjective lens precludes the possibility of seeing or hearing or experiencing it in itself and therefore produces a relation of domination. Subjectification is precisely the opposite of a mimetic or adaptive orientation but rather a projection of the self onto the object and, in the case of personalization through digital means, expecting it to serve one’s needs. We need not adopt the overarching framework of domination in modern societies in order to consider the ethical question Adorno’s work raises and that Kompridis echoes. That is, how can we hear what is different or decentering, how can we hear the voices of others, if the referent is always the self?

If on the one hand, choice is limitless, on the other it is limited by the very idea of personalization – and perhaps that is the fundamental contradiction here. Aesthetic experience is surely subjective but rather than being personal, it is also always an encounter with something other, something different, something or someone outside of ourselves. Music refers to what we have in common, be it our singularity, our distinction, or our sense of mutual dependence and obligation to each other. It comes from and refers to our common world. To that extent, personalization is a trap rather than a fulfillment, a foreclosing of rather than an opening to the possibilities of aesthetic experience.

Conclusion

It is nearly impossible to generalize about experience, much less aesthetic experience, and I want to reiterate that doing so on the basis of a few interviews is not my intention. Rather, I hope to have uncovered some of the contradictions of the digitized music world and to evoke a set of possibilities that may be otherwise obscured. For it would be naïve to assume that digital forms of musical encounter are not having some kind of impact on aesthetic experience just as they have had on intimate life (Illouz, 2007, 2012), how we communicate (Turkle, 2011), how we think (Carr, 2010) and how we learn. Nor should we assume that digital practices are mere extensions or intensifications of what occurs in other settings, or on the other hand proceed as though what happens online is wholly distinct from our analog realities.

Illouz’s argument is not that the digital environment has changed romantic experience for every single person who pursues it in that medium, but that it contributes to changes in our expectations of romance more broadly. She points to shifts in what she calls the “cultural forms” of fantasy, imagination and romantic love that are premised on, among other things, the ecology of market choice in the digital environment, its reliance on textuality as a way of knowing and its distancing from the body. In a similar fashion, the quantization and personalization of digital technologies may be shifting key elements of aesthetic experience – what it means to judge and how we encounter difference – as well as precipitating changes in our expectations of music as a cultural form. If the aesthetic experience of music has some resonance for how we inhabit a common world, if it is indeed linked to the possibilities for collective flourishing, these changes are of potentially broad social consequence.