Archives for April 2015

In last week’s post I wrote about a lecture by Polly Carl on the first half of Elaine Scarry’s monograph on beauty, which focuses on the relationship between beauty and truth. This week’s post takes as a starting point Polly’s lecture on the second half of Scarry’s book, which focuses on the relationship between beauty and justice. From there, it explores the importance of beauty in a democratic society.

How beauty presses us toward justice

Polly began her lecture by explaining that there are two enduring criticisms of beauty that Scarry seeks to counter.

(1)   The first criticism is that beauty distracts us from social wrongs. Scarry counters with the argument that seeing something beautiful wakes us up and inspires us to turn our attention to others. She writes (on p. 81) of Plato’s notion that we move from “eros,” in which we are seized by the beauty of one person, to “caritas,” in which our care is extended to all people.

(2)   The second criticism of beauty is that the viewer’s gaze is destructive to the object or person. Scarry counters this idea with the argument that when we pay attention to another being, both viewer and object come alive. She writes (on p. 90), Beauty is, then, a compact, or contract between the beautiful being (a person or thing) and the perceiver. As the beautiful being confers on the perceiver the gift of life, so the perceiver confers on the beautiful being the gift of life. [1]

Scarry also finds that these two enduring criticisms of beauty are fundamentally contradictory. The first assumes that if our ‘gaze’ could just be shifted away from beauty toward some neglected object our attention would bring the wronged object remedy; the second assumes that sustained attention can never be beneficial and always brings suffering to the object.

Scarry addresses these two criticisms as the first step in her thesis that:

… beauty, far from contributing to social injustice in either of the two ways it stands accused, or even remaining neutral to injustice as an innocent bystander, actually assists us in the work of addressing injustice …

Below is a video of a lecture in which Scarry outines the key arguments about beauty and social justice from her book. My points below are drawn from this videotaped lecture.

Scarry prefaces her talk by noting that beauty and justice share the same synonym—fairness—and that, etymologically, the word that best describes the opposite of both beauty and justice is injury. Scarry then outlines three sites in which beauty presses us toward justice.

I. Beauty in the object itself.

The attributes of the beautiful object have parallel attributes in justice. For example, the symmetry in a flower, or a poem, or Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper, models the concept of justice, which is defined by John Rawls as “a symmetry of everyone’s relations to each other.”

II. The immediate response to beauty in the viewer.

In The Sovereignty of Good Iris Murdoch’s asks, “How can we make ourselves better?” She answers: In a secular age, beauty is the “most obvious thing in our surroundings” to help us “move in the direction of unselfishness, objectivity, and realism.”[2] Murdoch observes that when a beautiful object hooks our attention it draws us out of our normal state of selfish absorption and shifts our attention to the world around us. She calls this process unselfing. 

Scarry’s term for this unselfing is opiated adjacency, by which she means that beauty reveals to us that we are not the center of the universe, but that the experience of ‘sitting on the sidelines’ is pleasurable. Scarry argues that while many things can bring us pleasure and many things can knock us into the margins, beauty may be the only thing that does both. When we are transfixed by the beautiful object, it inspires in us a desire to locate truth (discussed in last week’s post) and advance justice.

III. In the aftermath, when beauty gives rise to the act of creation.

This is the idea of replication or unceasing begetting (also discussed in  last week’s post). When we see beauty we are drawn to create more beauty: We write a poem, take a photograph, compose a song, bake a cake, plant a garden, draft a legal treatise, share a beautiful object with another. This unceasing begetting inevitably leads to the distribution of more beauty in the world.

The importance of beauty in a democratic society

A couple of weeks after Polly’s lecture I asked the students to read the first 55 pages (sections I-III) of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric. My aim was to explore the importance of beauty (in particlar, art and artists) in a democratic society. As President John F. Kennedy spoke in a 1963 speech honoring the life of poet Robert Frost:

If sometimes our great artists have been the most critical of our society, it is because their sensitivity and their concern for justice, which must motivate any true artist, makes him aware that our Nation falls short of its highest potential. I see little of more importance to the future of our country and our civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist. … Artists are not engineers of the soul. It may be different elsewhere. But democratic society–in it, the highest duty of the writer, the composer, the artist is to remain true to himself and to let the chips fall where they may. In serving his vision of the truth, the artist best serves his nation.

In her beautiful book-length poem, interspersed with images, Claudia Rankine raises our consciousness of everyday acts of racism. Two of the sections the students read are, essentially, a record of injurious remarks that Rankine has taken in and a recounting of the anger that has built up over time in response to these humiliations. She gives testimony to these everday shocks to the system as in a diary or logbook: one per page, page upon page.  Here are two pages:

Page 12

Because of your elite status from a year’s worth of travel, you have already settled into your window seat on United Airlines, when a girl and her mother arrive at your row. The girl, looking over at you, tells her mother, these are our seats, but this is not what I expected. The mother’s response is barely audible—I see, she says. I’ll sit in the middle.

Page 43

When a woman you work with calls you by the name of another woman you work with, it is too much of a cliché not to laugh out loud with the friend beside you who says, oh no she didn’t. Still, in the end, who cares? She had a fifty-fifty chance of getting it right.

Yes, and in your mail the apology note appears referring to “our mistake.” Apparently your own invisibility is the real problem causing her confusion. This is how the apparatus she propels you into begins to multiply its meaning.

What did you say?

In addition to exploring the meaning and impact of particular passages, I prompted discussion among the students with a number of questions:

• What is Rankine’s goal with this work?
• Does it turn you off or draw you in? Why?
• Do you recognize this everyday racism she’s talking about?
• How does reading this poem make you feel?
• Have you witnessed or experienced or participated in these types of injuries?
• Where else and how else do we dehumanize people?
• Have you ever felt injured in this way?

Dehumanization explored on a visit to the Chazen Museum of Art

The day we discussed Rankine we also spent an hour at Chazen Museum of Art viewing four artworks, selected by the docents. Two were the sculptures Humiliation by Design by Beth Cavener Stichter and Black Jack, by Inigo Manglano-Ovalle.

 

With the docents, we observed the threatening angle and missile-like tip of Black Jack, as well as the work’s cold, dark, impenetrable surface. We interpreted it to be about asserting power over another. It brought to mind notions of war games and star wars. We also noted that the large globes of the jack reflect back to the viewer a distorted self image. In contrast, Cavener’s goat (evidently based on someone she knows, as many of her works are) embodies the state of being systematically disgraced, shamed, tortured, or disempowered by another. We were at first repelled by and then drawn into this sculpture. The students were invited to spend more time with the work they found most interesting. A majority decided to revisit the goat sculpture.

After the Chazen visit, sculptor Paul Sacaridiz (who is currently chair of the Art Department at UW-Madison) talked about his work and process (more on that in another post); however, he also took a few moments at the top of his talk to speak to the importance of beauty (and, in particular, artists and art) in a democratic society. He commented to the students, “As graduates of a university, you have an obligation to look at the world critically and to question things. […] Art is a way of understanding the world; and there is no better way of comprehending things that are ambiguous or contradictory or complex than by going to see art. […] If you spend time with art you begin to develop this understanding.”

Portfolio Assignment: Injury Documented

While the students’ portfolios are intended primarily as catalogues of their experiences of the beautiful, in week 8 I gave them the exercise: Creatively document a way in which you see people being dehumanized in your world (small world or big world). Many documented ways in which the homeless, the physically different, those with mental illness, the LGBT community, and ethnic minorities are routinely dehumanized. A few also captured the everyday harms we inflict upon each other in our day-to-day social interactions on social media and in person. A good example of the latter is this poem by student, Michelle Croak. I end this post by sharing it with you.

It is saying “Hello!” on the street
and a negative thing behind closed doors.
It is asking your roommate how their day was
and checking your email while they answer.
It is telling someone you are SO sorry
and feeling nothing but regret for saying the “S word.”
What is it?

It is telling someone “We should catch up!”
without following up.
It is saying “I love you”
without action to back it up.
It is offering to cover someone’s portion of the check
without bringing out your credit card.
What is it?

It is unconditional love
but including all the conditions.
It is being Facebook Official
but refusing to hold hands around others.
It is saying everyone is equal
but not including everyone.
What is it?

What is it?
Dishonest. Insincere. Artificial. Untruthful. Disingenuous.
Dehumanizing.
Do we need a single word, a single phrase for all of these actions?
Do you see yourself in them? Do you see others?
Have you witnessed them and said nothing?
Then the next time I ask you, “What is it?”
You only need one word to answer.
Me.

***

[1] While not referenced by Scarry, for more on this notion I recommend the recent New York Times article, Being There: Heidegger and Why Our Presence Matters. Hat tip to my friend, Greg Conniff, for drawing this article to my attention.

[2] Murdoch, I. (1991). The sovereignty of good. London: Routledge. As cited in Winston 2006, p. 285.

 

Approaching Elaine Scarry’s On Beauty and Being Just:

Elaine Scarry is a major contributor to the discussion on beauty. In the sixth week, the always brilliant Polly Carl gave a lecture on Scarry’s monograph (based on a series of lectures), “On Beauty and Being Just.” Scarry is a professor of aesthetics and literature and her book is an attempt to rescue beauty from its banished state in the humanities (by which Scarry means the conversation about beauty, not beautiful objects themselves).

It’s difficult to summarize Elaine Scarry’s potent monograph in a few paragraphs, much less Polly Carl’s reflections on Scarry. I’ve cherry-picked a few ideas from Polly’s lecture on the first half of Scarry’s monograph, On Beauty and Being Wrong, which examines how beauty evokes in us a longing or conviction to locate what is true.

I. Beauty is sacred, unprecedented, life-saving, and incites deliberation

Akin to (but more rigorous than) the characteristics of beauty proposed by Howard Gardner (which are essentially aimed at helping us recognize the beautiful experience), Elaine Scarry proposes four features of beauty:

1. Beauty is sacred. An encounter with the beautiful is almost like a religious experience; it seems to have been inspired by the gods.
2. Beauty is unprecedented. An encounter with the beautiful initially causes you to reel backwards in your mind and search “Have I seen this before?” (You have not; or if you have, only rarely.)
3. Beauty is lifesaving. “Beauty quickens. It adrenalizes. It makes the heart beat faster. It makes life more vivid, animated, living, worth living.”
4. Beauty incites deliberation. Beauty fills you with something beside yourself and you are then inspired to go forward and locate what is true. It’s a starting point. It inspires imagination. It makes us want to live better. We are constrained by the material world; but we can imagine anything. Beauty does that. 

II. Beauty compels replication

Correspondent with Howard Gardner’s notion that beautiful experiences invite revisiting, Scarry asserts that beauty compels replication (what she calls unceasing begetting). This doesn’t necessarily mean that if you see a beautiful flower you will photograph or draw it (though it might). This replication takes many forms. For example: We linger. We stare. We replay an image or scene in our mind. We play the same song over and over again. We insist to others, “You must see this!” We send postcards, “Wish you were here.”

III. We can be wrong about beauty

One of the recurring discussions in the course is around the notion that beauty is subjective (Gardner argues to the point of being idiosyncratic, even). Something is beautiful to you but not to me, for instance, and this difference is a factor of many things (including cultural background, context, education, and aesthetic sensibility). Related to this, Scarry finds that what we find beautiful (or not) today, may change; and she problematizes these changes as “errors.” Scarry recognizes two types of error with regard to beauty:

• The first is over-crediting, when something we once deemed beautiful suddenly seems the opposite.
• The second is failed generosity, when something we overlooked or dismissed we now see as beautiful.

For Scarry, an example of the second kind of error is palm trees, which she did not find beautiful, until she did. This prompts Scarry to wonder about all the beauty she has missed.

IV. Beauty is the basic impulse underlying education

One of the most compelling ideas of Scarry that Polly touched on (from my perspective) is the assertion that beauty is the basic impulse underlying education. Scarry’s argument is built on one by Simone Weil who (in Waiting for God) explains the “love of beauty” as “the love of all the truly precious things that bad fortune can destroy.”[2] Scarry notes that the first of these “truly precious things” numbered by Weil is education—what Weil calls “the pure and authentic achievements of art and sciences.” Scarry elaborates on Weil, writing:

This willingness continually to revise one’s own location in order to place oneself in the path of beauty is the basic impulse underlying education. One submits oneself to other minds (teachers) in order to increase the chance that one will be looking in the right direction when a comet makes its sweep through a certain patch of sky.

This hopeful passage is resonant with Rebecca Solnit’s notion of getting lost (placing oneself on the path of the unforseen) in order to be taken beyond what is already known. (See last week’s post for more on Solnit and the merits of getting lost).

What beauty is doing to us, thus far:

After introducing this last idea of Scarry, Polly asked the students how they think they have changed or what they have learned from the course, thus far.  Here were some of the responses. In the parentheses are my attempts to categorize these benefits in terms of qualities of leadership.

• I do things I wouldn’t do. [daring, courage, unconstrained by pragmatism]
• I look at things harder. [critical observation, looking beyond the surface, better seeing]
• I see other people’s points of view. I think, “There might be more going on here so I won’t jump to a conclusion.” [empathy, balancing conflicting elements, able to see things from multiple viewpoints simultaneously]
• I am re-evaluating relationships in my life. [emotional intelligence]
• I am asking whether I’ve had the emphasis on the wrong things. [contemplating values and purpose in relationship to action]
• I am thinking about homework differently—how to make it creative, not anxiety-provoking. How not to approach homework with dread. [approaching work with creativity, imagination, hope]
• I’m trying to focus on the process, not the product. [quality and excellence in the way of working, not just the end result]
• I am slowing down. [paying attention, being present]

When Polly was here and giving her two lectures it was midway through the term. I had been feeling a bit anxious about making the turn from talking about beauty in art and nature to exploring how cultivating an aesthetic sensibility (encountering beauty) leads to better leadership (the promise of all those academic papers I found when I was developing my course).  I provided an overview of all those papers in the essay I posted several weeks ago—Why Beauty in a Business School. You would be forgiven if you peered into that bag of bones and quickly slammed the door shut.

After Polly’s lecture–and getting this bit of feedback on the class from the students–I began to feel less anxious about this process. I perceived that, without forcing things to a particular end, but simply by committing to the experience of the class itself, the students were beginning to transform. An email from my generous and insightful pen pal/mentor, the artist Carter Gillies helped me to recognize this. He wrote to me after reading last week’s post (the one inspired by Polly’s lecture on Rebecca Solnit’s book, A Field Guide to Getting Lost).

The conclusion you draw at the end of the post is perhaps the single most important objective you could achieve: It’s not simply about perception, as if what students were learning were akin to picking up microscopes and telescopes to peer at the world differently. And they are not simply flexing some long unused muscle, changing their abilities by degree, lifting heavier mental objects, more nuanced aesthetic experience. Rather, the project they are most working on is their own transformation. They are working on the project of themselves in the same way that every artist isn’t simply learning techniques and processes but a way of fitting in the world that had been impossible for the person they once were.

If the key is being more open minded, then its not simply a difference in allowing more things as possible, an incremental adjustment, but changing from a lock with a specific keyhole to a wide open vista. It’s not a change in degree as much as in kind, the chrysalis giving way to the butterfly. Which, of course was part of the point I was making in that post [Maximum Beauty] I referred you to in a previous email suggesting that what we like and don’t like are not always divided by the increments of our better understanding them as much as the qualitative incommensurability between them. To be open minded enough to capture those inconsistent thoughts was what the F. Scott Fitzgerald quote had to do with: “An artist is someone who can hold two completely opposing viewpoints and still function”. It seems your students are on this path …

I couldn’t say it any better.

I find I am also beginning to feel some of these same benefits as a result of having set aside my dissertation for a bit to focus on the beauty course. I’m slowing down. I am more present. I am living more intuitively. I’ve thrown away the manic to-do lists I’ve lived by since at least college, maybe earlier. And I feel like my relationship to work is beginning to shift. I’m developing the capacity to relinquish control. I am learning how to approach this course and my dissertation with more curiosity and creativity, less force and determination to achieve particular ends or goals. More than anything, I’m beginning to figure out a way of fitting in the world (which I haven’t really felt since moving overseas five years ago).

So, this is what beauty is doing to us, thus far …

PS – I highly recommend Carter Gillies’ blog, including the post mentioned above, Maximum Beauty.

PPS – Polly also lectured on the second half of Scarry’s monograph–On Beauty and Being Fair–which addresses the relationship between beauty and justice. I will discuss this particular aspect of beauty in a future post. One can handle only so much Scarry in a single post. 🙂

[1] Murdoch, I. (1991). The sovereignty of good. London: Routledge. As cited in Winston 2006, p. 285.

[2] Simone Weil, “Love of the order of the world” in Waiting for God, trans. Emma Craufurd., p.  180

 

Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go. Three years ago I was giving a workshop in the Rockies. A student came in bearing a quote from what she said was the pre-Socratic philosopher Meno. It read, “How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?” I copied it down, and it has stayed with me since. … The question she carried struck me as the basic tactical question in life. The things we want are transformative, and we don’t know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation. Love, wisdom, grace, inspiration — how do you go about finding these things that are in some ways about extending the boundaries of the self into unknown territory, about becoming someone else?       – Rebecca Solnit

If you have never read Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost, read it. It’s a beautiful series of essays on the value of losing oneself in order to undergo transformation. The passage I’ve just quoted does a good job of conveying its essence and impetus. In week five of the beauty class we were joined by two special guests, Polly Carl, (who has been instrumental in my thinking about this course) and her partner, the fiction writer Lynette D’Amico, who designed a class session inspired by Solnit’s book.

Polly Carl: On Getting Lost

Polly spent about 90 minutes introducing students to key ideas in Solnit’s book and guiding them through a discussion on getting lost, anxiety, wandering, wondering, desire, and longing and how these relate to the creative process. She structured the lecture around a range of provocative questions she posed to the students, such as:

• What would you like to become right now? We talk about who we are, but who would you like to become?
• How do we “calculate the unforeseen”? When and how do we encounter that which we do not already know? When and how do we put ourselves on paths that will make this more likely?
• Where do you feel longing? Where do you feel desire? Longing is the distance between where you are and where you long to be. The sensation of desire is beauty. How do we stay with the sensation of desire rather than seeking to accumulate stuff to fulfill the desire?
• Do you have to be in the present to have any hope of getting lost—of putting yourself on the path of the unknown? If so, how do we stay in the present?
• How often are you thinking about what you’re not doing? (This was a question posed to Polly by a scientist when she participated in an NEA research symposium on creativity and the brain.) For example, how often are you checking social media when you are not in a position to respond to it (for instance, in the middle of class)?
• If creativity lives in the space of being lost and in the ability to roam, is anxiety the opposite of creativity? Solnit talks about how explorers got lost all the time; however, the difference between explorers and the rest of us is that they approach getting lost with optimism. Has anxiety replaced optimism? How much anxiety do you feel about school, for instance? What would it mean to replace this with optimism and creativity?
• How do others see you? When do you see yourself? How do we become lost to ourselves? Solnit tells us lost has two meanings: the familiar falling away and the unfamiliar appearing. Do we need to lose the sense of how we are perceived through the eyes of others in order to see ourselves more clearly?

In perhaps my favorite moment in the lecture, Polly talked about the following passage from Solnit’s book:

The word ‘lost’ comes from the Old Norse los, meaning the disbanding of an army, and this origin suggests soldiers falling out of formation to go home, a truce with the wide world. I worry now that many people never disband their armies, never go beyond what they know. Advertising, alarmist news, technology, incessant busyness, and the design of public and private space conspire to make it so.

She then asked the class: What disbands your army?

The first student to raise her hand responded, “This beauty class disbands my army.”

Others agreed.

Lynette D’Amico: On Story

Polly ended her lecture by telling the students about an experience (that she had with Lynette) of getting trapped underground in a NYC subway packed with people, without air conditioning or lights, on a blazing hot day. After a short break, Lynette then read the short story she eventually wrote, Fictions of the City, inspired by the subway fiasco. The point of this exercise was to examine how an artist takes an experience (in this case, one filled with tremendous anxiety) and shapes it into a story.

Lynette commented after reading her story to the students: Stories are how we make sense of the world and experience things that don’t make sense to us. They are how we stand in the prsence of wonder and mystery. She then talked about the process she used to approach the project (among many things, her research on various aspects of subways in NYC and her desire to make a connection to The Great Gatsby).

Lynette then showed the William Kentridge video, Journey to the Moon, which she used as a catalyst to talk about what it means to live in a space of wonder and mystery. She also read a statement by Kentridge to the students: There is a desperation in all certainty. The category of political uncertainty, philosophical uncertainty, uncertainty of images is much closer to how the world is.

The students were asked to think about the possible meanings of various elements in the film in light of this statement.

Portfolio Assignment #1: Wander to Wonder

At the end of class, Lynette gave the students the following portfolio assignment:

Get lost and record the experience. The form of getting lost can be geographical or experiential. It could be going somewhere you’ve never been before, which can be a neighborhood, a park, a lake, a city, a building. It could be going to a restaurant and ordering a type of food you haven’t had before. It could be going to a church. It could be going to a sports event. It could be going to an arts event. It could be doing something you’ve never done before, something you’ve been thinking about, or wanting to do, like trying a pilates class at your gym, or riding a city bus, or something spur of the moment and spontaneous, finding a roof top where you can watch the sun rise, or watching a foreign film. The parameters are that you have to go someplace where you don’t already know the rules or the norms, and document your experience, and the documentation can be in a form of your choosing. You can write about the experience, take photos, send a series of texts to a buddy and then capture those texts.

Some studets went to restaurants, some wandered down streets in parts of town where they had never ventured, one walked into a small gallery on campus she had always been curious about, and more than a few ended up losing their smart phones for a day. Here’s how student Lindsay Bloomfield documented her experience of losing her connection to her phone for a day.

No signal.

I lost my friend Siri yesterday. I lost my friends Chris Martin, Taylor Rice, and Kanye West whom I talk to almost everyday. I ached to hear my friend cry out “Turn left in 300 feet”. But, it was quiet.

Silent.

Then I heard it. The faintest rustle of the trees. The deep bellowing of my breath. The laughs coming from an unknown place up the street.

Then I saw it. The blinding sun piercing across the vast sky. That night I saw the same sky splattered with perfectly sporadic specks.

Then I felt it. Above the ache for my simulated friends on my 5.44 x 2.64 screen, I was a present in the present. A gift of the hour. The hour, in turn, a gift to me. It was a symmetry I hadn’t found before.

A peacefulness.

Portfolio Assignment #2: How to Listen to Music

In the last half hour of class I talked with the students about another portfolio assignment I had given them the week prior. I asked the students to watch a TED Talk by the renowned conductor, Michael Tilson Thomas, called Music and Emotion Through Time. I then asked them to sit quietly, do nothing, listen to a piece of music lasting at least 40 minutes, and document the experience.

A number of students commented after their classical music listening experience that they had never actually sat quietly and listened to a long piece of classical music from start to finish. Many also remarked on how soothing, clarifying, inspiring or energizing it was. Given our discussions about anxiety and the pressure that students feel in relationship to school and life, this struck me as rather meaningful.

Here’s how one student, Brian Thue, documented how he felt after listening to Henryk Gorecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs.

Nothing anxious here. If anything, the image is quite the opposite–both soulful and transcendent.

***

As I reflected on Solnit’s gorgeous book and this equally gorgeous class session designed by Polly Carl and Lynette D’Amico, I thought:

This is the value of beauty in a business school. It requires that students “disband their armies” … “go beyond what they know” … “expand their boundaries.” By sending them out into the world each week with assignments to get lost, sit quietly, really listen, look closely and then reflect on what they sense, feel, and think–they are not just learning a new (aesthetic) way of knowing the world, they are also encountering different parts of themselves. They are learning a different way of being in the world.