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Christmas on 34th Street: a history of NYC department stores [excerpt]

Each year, department stores in New York City decorate their windows with ornate holiday displays. Taking on festive themes with dazzling lights, crystals, and figurines, these stores aim to entice shoppers and encourage passers-by to get into the holiday spirit. In the following excerpt from Greater Gotham, Mike Wallace discusses the history of these famous department stores and their connection to the economy of New York City.

By 1917 Fifth Avenue, once a genteel lane of residences and hotels, had become a bustling boulevard of cavernous bazaars. Now store managers, together with new marketing professionals, invented myriad ways to entice middle- and upper-class women—80 to 90 percent of shoppers were female—into entering and buying.

Window displays flourished behind newly inexpensive plate glass. They offered scenes from current theatrical productions, thematic ensembles of furnished rooms, or outfits of clothing down to the last accessory. The job of display person became significant in these years; a single big store might employ dozens. Chicagoan L. Frank Baum, when not writing children’s tales, founded the National Association of Window Trimmers to uplift “mercantile decorating” to the status of a profession. Baum also edited the Show Window, in which he promoted scores of tactics that might “arouse in the observer the cupidity and longing to possess the goods.” Female mannequins, clad only in corsets and sexy undergarments, helped in this regard, generating crowds—but also scandalized protests from purity reformers. Santa Clauses became another draw during month-long Christmas extravaganzas. Santas not only proliferated but organized: by 1914 the Santa Claus Association, headquartered in New York City, had undertaken “to preserve Children’s faith in Santa Claus.”

Window displays are a holiday staple for department stores. Image credit: “Christmas window display” by Per-Olof Forsberg. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

More broadly still, the development of new merchandising strategies was underwritten by the emergence of schools and institutes devoted to teaching such skills, from decorative architecture to commercial design and display. Both Pratt Institute and Cooper Union offered commercial art programs after 1905. The Parsons School of Design, which had begun in 1896 as the art-oriented Chase School (after its founder, the painter William Merritt Chase), refocused itself after the arrival in 1904 of Frank Alvah Parsons, who urged that art and design be better linked to industry and commerce. The school proceeded to offer a series of educational firsts—programs in fashion design, interior design, and advertising and graphic design. The latter was particularly apposite, as department store managers were advertising copiously in the metropolitan press (especially the Sunday papers), thereby providing the city’s newspaper industry with a crucial income stream; vice versa, the big stores and big papers now settled into symbiotic and profitable partnership.

Once lured inside, women entered a festive arena of continuous spectacle, one that offered an escape hatch from parlor propriety into a glamorous world of public pleasure. A host of theatrical effects vivified the commodities on sale: brilliantly colored glass and lights (made possible by the new aniline coal-tar dyes), profuse flower displays, splashing fountains, resplendent live birds, and romantic settings (like Turkish bazaars) which (as at Coney Island) conjured up exotic lands. Everyday items became objects of desire whose acquisition could fulfill dreams as well as supply needs. The excitement, the sensory stimulation, the profusion and availability of goods, encouraged impulse buying in some, shoplifting in others.

Service supplemented spectacle. Customers were pampered with amenities rivaling the luxurious appointments of a downtown men’s club. These appealed to upper-class pretensions and allowed middle-class women to experience lifestyles of the rich. The emporium came to seem as much community center as store, a delightful place to socialize with friends.

It took a small army to keep these carefully crafted dream worlds in good working order. Already in 1898 Macy’s had over 3,000 employees, as many as did most textile mills or steel plants, and by 1919 the total reached 10,000—fluctuating to twice that number during the holiday season. To an extraordinary degree, it was a female workforce. Women occupied all but the highest managerial ranks; almost one-third of the buyers for the store were women. The sales staff was overwhelmingly female. Given that it had been 88 percent male as late as the 1880s, this represented a transformation as thoroughgoing as that worked in the clerical staffing of skyscrapers. Native-born daughters of Irish, Italian, Polish, Russian, German, and Scandinavian working-class families flocked to the stores despite low wages, long hours, and high expenses for the requisite good clothing. Pink-collar selling was considered higher status work than blue-collar manufacturing jobs. And National Consumer League pressure, new laws, and the managers’ own need to cultivate a cheerful satisfied sales force eventually led stores to moderate brutal discipline and to improve wages and working conditions somewhat.

Macy’s ca. 1908. (Image No. 93.1.1.18407, Byron Company/Museum of the City of New York). Please do not use without permission.

The department stores fitted into the city’s macro-economy in a more fundamental way, by becoming linchpins of the fashion industry, of which Gotham was the American capital. It had long been the port of entry for Parisian creations and the home to pattern-book magazines (like the Butterick Company’s Ladies Quarterly of Broadway Fashions [1867] and the Delineator [1873]), which passed along the latest designs for women to reproduce at home. By 1903, Butterick’s pattern-manufacturing operation having become a huge global business, the company erected the sixteen-story Butterick Building at Spring and MacDougal, which contained the largest publishing plant in the city. With the explosion of the women’s ready-to-wear industry, New York became central to designing and marketing the garments it was producing.

Department stores were at the heart of the process. Heavily reliant on fashion’s mutability to ensure continuing sales, they worked overtime to convince consumers (as a trade paper acknowledged) that “last season’s coat, costume or hat is irretrievably out of date.” At the same time they promoted that mutability by serving as launch vehicle for the latest styles. In the 1900s Wanamaker’s, Macy’s, and Gimbels held fashion shows with live models (many of them unemployed chorus girls) displaying imported gowns. By the 1910s, great spring and fall pageants with orchestras and special effects were commonplace. And though Paris set the style trends, American women waited to see which French novelties were adopted or rejected in Manhattan.

Featured image credit: “Lord & Taylor’s Enchanted Forest holiday window display: mice on a bear’s head” by Lorle Shaull. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

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A composer’s Christmas: David Bednall

We recently caught up with composer David Bednall to find out how he celebrates Christmas, why he feels music is important to people at Christmas time, and to reflect on the sense of hope that Christmas brings.

What’s your favourite thing about the Christmas season?

The music certainly, and being home for the family Christmas and goose. In many ways, I actually prefer Advent with its sense of expectation. For me, Christmas is a hugely nostalgic time as well as a way of remembering people who are no longer around. That said; I never tire of the beautiful musical pieces of the season, and the wonderful carols.

Is there anything about Christmas that particularly inspires your composing?

The atmosphere and the sense of expectation. It is a season where simple emotions can be very powerful and moving, and where there is a sense of hope for a better future. There are also some wonderful Christmas texts which always help motivate me to compose.

What marks the beginning of Christmas for you?

Advent Sunday, I would think, at the darkness to light service. Although the first Christmas Concert definitely marks the beginning of the feeling of the Christmas season.

What’s your favourite Christmas film?

I’m not sure in all honesty… The Snowman and Father Christmas are family classics. I have to admit though, I never really tire of Rik Mayall and Ade Edmundson’s Bottom Christmas Special….

What’s your favourite Christmas carol and why?

David Bednall. Used with permission.

My favourite congregational carol is It came upon a midnight clear – the tune is beautiful, and I’m always very touched by the lines regarding the weariness of the Earth. Darke’s In the bleak midwinter is possibly the most perfect choir carol ever written – I feel that it must have been composed in one fell swoop due to Darke’s sheer inspiration. Howells’s Spotless Rose is also a favourite, and Bax’s Mater ora filium too – the start of the latter is the most evocative sound I know of an imagined medieval Oxford chapel.

Are there any seasonal activities that you particularly enjoy doing?

I like the pub carol singing that happens at home, and the various other social events that occur at this time of year. It’s also nice to have some completely guilt-free lazy time!

What does a typical Christmas day look like for you? 

I play for Midnight Mass at the Parish Church in Wells and then go down to Dorset for a family Christmas, often getting to my family home at about 2 am. We have stockings in the morning (it’s a contractual part of coming back) and then goose for lunch before going for a walk and receiving presents in the afternoon, and then possibly playing some games. We have a big family and so we often see people over several days, which mean Christmas lasts for nearly a week!

Why do you think music is so important to people at Christmas time?

I think that Christmas carols are deeply embedded in our psyche (even if many are not actually that old) and provide a reminder of our childhood, which is why we are drawn to them so powerfully – even people who don’t like church music will know at least a few carols. Music is such a powerful force that is even more influential at an emotional time such as Christmas. There are also some fantastic pieces of music especially written for this time; this all adds to how important music is to the season. There is also something deeply joyous about singing carols with others… you feel very connected to the past at that time, I think.

What is the most memorable Christmas you have ever had?

I’m honestly not sure! The ones of childhood with grandparents are always the best – I miss them at Christmas time and love remembering Christmases past when they were round. I do also remember one or two where it really snowed as well!

Featured image credit: Christmas decorations by Suju. Public domain via Pixabay . 

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Newton and the perils of the imagination

In the 17th century, there were two contradictory attitudes to the imagination or ‘phantasy’. For many it was valued as the source of wit and invention; but for others it was the basis of deception, superstition, and mental illness.

It was John Calvin, a century earlier, who had warned that the mind was a dungeon and a factory of idols. English puritan writers followed in his wake, cautioning against the seductive tendencies of the unregenerate imagination, which tempted believers to mistake for the works of God what were really only the fictions of their own devising. This attitude was then absorbed by English natural philosophers such as Francis Bacon, who argued that the imagination was the underlying source of many of the ‘idols’ that bedevilled the human mind.

Isaac Newton (1643 – 1727) stood within this tradition.

As a student at Cambridge, he performed a series of experiments designed to test the power of his imagination, based on his reading of works by natural philosophers Joseph Glanvill and Robert Boyle (both just a few years his senior). Newton ‘heightened’ the power of his fancy by looking at the sun in different positions in order to ‘tenderize’ his sight. Extraordinarily bright after-images imposed themselves on him whether he wanted them to or not, and after lying in bed with the curtains drawn for several days, he concluded that ‘the tenderest sight argues the clearest fantasie of things visible & hence something of the nature of madnesse & dreames may be gathered’.

Trinity College Notebook (MS Add.3996) via the Cambridge University Library.

Newton’s scientific investigations were paralleled by his theological critique. In a series of remarkable writings circa. 1661 – 1665 he analysed the actions and morals of the Desert Fathers and their efforts to resist temptation. Newton argued that they had in fact actively encouraged their own carnal imaginations; they had wrongly believed that they could imitate the experience of Jesus in the Judaean Desert and thwart the temptations offered by Satan. But the techniques they deployed to tame their own imaginations could only end in defeat, and their extreme and unnatural mental and corporeal regimens inevitably inflamed the imagination, leading inexorably to the lustful thoughts they professed to despise. In a very short time, monks trained in these practices and driven mad by both day and night-time visions of naked women, formed religious communities that were, Newton concluded, cesspits of fornication.

To Newton, the imagination was always liable to tempt the unwary into idolatry, idleness, and lust. The only way to avoid its baneful effects was to be relentlessly active, focusing on useful, rational, and godly endeavours such as mathematics, natural philosophy, and theology.

The dangerous consequences were not limited to the impact on the individual. Since the listless and undisciplined scientific mind was prone to produce a slew of systems and hypotheses that were merely the seductive products of human ingenuity, the whole scientific community would then be beset by the anarchy of mere opinion.

Newton’s fear and loathing of the effects of the imagination was embedded in the influential methodological advice he bequeathed to eighteenth-century science, the Principia Mathematica. In the ‘General Scholium’ added to the second (1713) edition his famous statement ‘Hypotheses non fingo’ (‘I do not feign hypotheses’) summed up his credo in three words. The most strident statement was then made in the ‘Preface’ to the 1713 edition written by the mathematician Roger Cotes, who noted that “by taking the foundation of their speculations from hypotheses”, Cartesians drifted off into dreams. By doing so “they merely put together a romance, elegant perhaps and charming, but nevertheless a romance”.

But within a few decades of Newton’s death, opinions on the imagination had changed – and in a way which has its own irony.

William Blake’s Newton (1795), colour print with pen & ink and watercolour. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Numerous authors paid homage to Newton’s incessant condemnation of systems, hypotheses, and untested theories. However, the argument went, brilliant hypotheses and theories of some kind surely had some role in guiding both experimenters and theorists in their work. By the middle of the eighteenth century the reputation of the scientific imagination was experiencing a remarkable resurgence. And the great exemplar of the newly invented ‘scientific genius’ was none other than Isaac Newton himself.

In 1767, William Duff argued that Newton’s discoveries showed

“the prodigious compass of that imagination, which could frame and comprehend such sublime conceptions [but at the same time] evince the profound depth of penetration and strength of reason, which by a kind of divine intuition, could discern and demonstrate truth.”

Seven years later Alexander Gerard claimed that it was Newton’s vast imagination that gave him “so great a command over the natural and intellectual world, that, in his philosophical enquiries, he misses no experiment which is necessary for promoting his investigation.”

In placing the imagination at the centre of their pioneering accounts of scientific genius, Duff and Gerard paved the way for modern ideas about scientific creativity. However, in doing so, they had decisively moved away from the religious and scientific concerns about the imagination which had so exercised their heroes, and which belonged to a different age.

Featured image credit: Portrait of Sir Isaac Newton, oil on canvas [M. Keynes, Iconography of Sir Isaac Newton, X], 1250 x 990mm., English School, [c.1715-1720]. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. 

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Good and evil: the role of smugglers in the migrant crisis [excerpt]

Since its inception in 2000, International Migrants Day has served as a platform to discuss human rights issues affecting migrants. This year, the UN is focusing on safe migration in a world on the move—opening up an international dialogue about how to ensure safe and systematic migration during times of instability. The migration system today is largely dependent on smugglers: as millions seek to escape violence and economic inequality, many become dependent on criminal networks to facilitate their transport. In the following excerpt from Migrant, Refugee, Smuggler, and Savior, Peter Tinti and Tuesday Reitano shed light on the complicated—and often over-simplified—role that smugglers play in the migrant crisis.

Smugglers are often portrayed as exploitative, profit-driven criminals; the villains who prey on the most desperate among us. Yet, as this book will demonstrate, such facile depictions are not only incorrect, they are counterproductive. They reduce the complex narrative of human migration into simple dichotomies of good and evil, in turn fostering bad policies that put migrants at risk while at the same time empowering criminal organisations.

In many instances, those who are promoting these narratives are deliberately conflating human smuggling with the much less morally ambiguous activity of human trafficking, hoping to operationalize universal disapproval of human trafficking to gain support for policies that are really intended to stem unpalatable migrant and refugee flows. The most intellectually honest and useful way to think about migrant smugglers is to consider them dispassionately as service providers.

They are the supply to someone else’s demand, and, as outlined in the previous section, demand has never been higher. Though every migrant has different motives, and different smugglers have different business models, fundamentally, all migrant–smuggler relationships are ones in which the smuggler is assisting the migrant—albeit for profit and often with little regard for the well-being of the migrant—to bypass barriers.

A barrier can come in the form of a wall, a guarded border, or dangerous territory where there is violent conflict, banditry, or even kidnappers who seek to abuse and extort migrants. Sometimes these barriers are natural or geographic, a desert that is hard to cross or a sea that is difficult to navigate. In other instances they are purely political, manifesting themselves in the form of stringent visa regimes or discriminatory policies.

Migrants in Hungary near the Serbian border. Image Credit: “Migrants in Hungary 2015 Aug 018” by Gémes Sándor/SzomSzed. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Additionally, barriers can be cultural, in which migrants physically stand out from the local population, or in which for reasons pertaining to gender, age, or language the migrant feels unable to navigate a foreign culture without the help of a smuggler. And because there are so many different profiles of migrants and so many different types of barriers to overcome, there are a number of different smuggling models within the migrant-smuggling industry.

Smuggling service providers exist on a spectrum. At one end are individuals who see a one-off business opportunity and form ad hoc alliances with other criminal entrepreneurs in order to pool their skills and deliver smuggler services. At the opposite end are highly professional organized crime syndicates that specialize in moving everything from drugs, weapons, stolen goods, and people over borders undetected.

The more challenging the barrier to overcome, the more professional, specialized, and, arguably, criminal the smugglers will need to be in order to provide their services. In situations where borders are easy to cross, there are low barriers to entry into the smuggling market and the profile of the smuggler trends towards the criminal opportunist.

Where barriers are greater, there are fewer actors with the requisite skills to deliver smuggling services, which means that the smuggling market will consist of fewer individuals, and most often those already involved in organized crime.

It is far easier, for example, to find someone who can navigate a forty-five-minute sea crossing from Turkey to the Greek islands than it is to find a crew that can travel 2,000 kilometers in open sea from the tip of Indonesia to a landing point in Australia. Anyone who can afford a rubber dinghy and a cheap motor can get in on the former. The latter requires considerable expertise.

The same economic principles apply to the prices people must pay for smuggler services. In circumstances where borders are relatively easy to cross and there is competition between smugglers, prices are lower than in cases where the barriers are high and only a few actors can provide the services needed.

A recent report commissioned by the EU estimated that all of the more than a million irregular migrants who entered the EU illegally in 2015 used the services of a smuggler at some point in their journey.

For the many people of different nationalities coming to Europe, a smuggler may be required in order to escape from their home state; to transit through various countries undetected and unharmed; to traverse land or sea borders in order to reach the Schengen territories of Europe; to arrive at their preferred destination; or all of the above.

In other words, smugglers have offered millions of people opportunity, security, and assistance. They exist because, in the absence of safe and legal ways of seeking refuge and opportunity, their services are highly coveted. Smugglers may then go on to try and expand their markets through active recruitment of prospective clients, or lies and false promises, but rarely do they create a market out of nothing.

Smugglers exist, first and foremost, because in the world we have created, where necessity demands movement but few legal options are available, they are essential.

Featured image credit:  “Migrants in Hungary 2015 Aug 015” by Gémes Sándor/SzomSzed. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

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Suing a company when you didn’t use its product

Ordinarily, American law says that you can sue a company only if you used the company’s product and that product injured you. Due to an odd quirk of pharmaceutical law, people who live in several of the United States are about to learn whether that fundamental principle remains true.

The United States Food and Drug Administration tells pharmaceutical manufacturers what the manufacturers can say on a drug’s labeling. For the innovator-manufacturer – the company that discovered a new molecule and turned it into a drug – the FDA occasionally lets the manufacturer make changes to the labeling without first obtaining FDA approval. But the labeling on the generic version of the drug – a copycat of the original molecule, allowed on the market several years after the innovator drug appears – cannot be changed at all. The labeling on the generic must be exactly the same as the labeling on the innovator’s version of the product.

This difference in regulation has led to a quirk in American law. Because innovators have some control over their products’ labeling (innovators can occasionally make unilateral labeling changes) patients who allege that they were injured by an innovator’s product are permitted to sue the innovator for having “failed to warn.” Patients can say that the manufacturer didn’t tell the patient all of the risks of the product. But because generic manufacturers have no control over the content of the labeling (the labeling must be precisely the same as on the innovator’s product) people who allege that they were injured by a generic’s product are not permitted to sue the generic manufacturer for failure to warn.

What’s an injured patient to do?

Many patients allegedly injured by the failure of a generic drug’s labeling to give adequate warnings have now sued companies that did not manufacture the product. Instead of suing the manufacturer of the product that the patients took – the generic company – these patients have sued the innovator instead. The theory is that although the innovator didn’t manufacture the product, the innovator controlled the labeling. The innovator is therefore responsible for a failure to warn even though the innovator didn’t manufacture the drug that the patient took and had no other relationship with the patient.

Innovator-manufacturers of course insist that this is an outrage. Centuries of tort law hold that a consumer can sue only the company that manufactured the product that the consumer used. If innovator-manufacturers are responsible for the damages caused by generic versions of a drug, innovators will face limitless liability and lose the incentive to develop new drugs. And innovators, of course, have spent huge sums of money researching and developing new drugs, while generic-manufacturers have invested comparatively little.

White medicinal container on white table by Tookapic. CC0 via Pexels.

Injured patients, however, say that they shouldn’t be left without a remedy: suppose a patient was hurt by a failure of a generic drug’s labeling to warn of a risk. The patient can’t sue the generic manufacturer. And the patient surely shouldn’t be left without a remedy. The only solution is to let the patient sue the innovator-manufacturer, which controls the labeling, even though the innovator didn’t manufacture the product that injured the patient.

To date, the innovator-manufacturers have won most of the cases on this issue. Courts have generally reasoned that a patient cannot sue a company that didn’t manufacture the product the patient used.

But the year 2018 is likely to see this issue finally resolved. The supreme courts of three different states – California, Massachusetts, and West Virginia – all currently have cases on their dockets that present precisely this issue.

If all three states rule that patients who took generic drugs cannot sue manufacturers of innovator drugs, it’s likely that this issue will wither on the vine. Other states will probably follow the lead of the first three states to rule.

On the other hand, if all three states rule that the patients are able to sue the innovator manufacturers, then the floodgates of liability for innovators will have opened.

If the courts split two to one, however, then two things will happen: First, every patient allegedly injured by a generic drug will struggle to find a justification to sue the innovator-manufacturer in the state that allows innovator liability to exist.

And the fight over this issue will go on into the future, as more state courts are faced with this issue and must decide whether to allow a novel theory of liability in unusual circumstances.

Featured image credit: Meds by Charles Williams. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

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Concerned scientists — World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: Second Notice

It’s been 25 years since more than 1,700 scientists, including a majority of the world’s living Nobel laureates in the sciences, co-signed the Scientists’ Warning to Humanity. This startling document published by the Union of Concerned Scientists, expressed concern about ozone depletion, freshwater availability, marine fishery collapses, ocean dead zones, forest loss, biodiversity destruction, climate change, and continued human population growth. The authors called on humankind to curtail environmental damage and advised that “a great change in our stewardship of the Earth and the life on it is required, if vast human misery is to be avoided.”

Since 1992, evidence has accumulated in each of these areas to show whether or not humanity has heeded the warning. Such data reported by scientific organizations and governments provide the basis for a “Second Notice.” This article published by BioScience shows that humanity has made some progress to protect the global environment, but many things have gotten much worse over the last 25 years, especially climate change and human population growth.

The highlights of the authors findings include:

A 26% reduction in the amount of fresh water available per capita
A drop in the harvest of wild-caught fish, despite an increase in fishing effort
A 75% increase in the number of ocean dead zones
A loss of nearly 300 million acres of forestland, much of it converted for agricultural uses
Continuing significant increases in global carbon emissions and average temperatures
A 35% rise in human population
A collective 29% reduction in the numbers of mammals, reptiles, amphibians, birds and fish

After the paper was accepted by BioScience editors, the authors offered other scientists the opportunity to review the draft and, if they agreed with it, to express their support as co-signers. Surprisingly, it has been signed by more than 15,000 scientists from 184 countries.

Fortunately, individuals, governments and other organizations can take steps to address these trends. Such actions could include establishing more terrestrial and marine reserves and strengthening enforcement of anti-poaching laws and restraints on wildlife trade. We could expand family planning and educational programs for women, promote a dietary shift toward plant-based foods, and massively adopt renewable energy and other “green” technologies. The authors acknowleged that it might take a groundswell of public pressure to convince political leaders to take such steps.

 Some people might be tempted to dismiss this evidence as alarmist. However. scientists are in the business of analyzing data and looking at long-term consequences. Those who signed this second warning aren’t just raising a false alarm. They are acknowledging the obvious signs that humanity is heading down an unsustainable path with dire consequences for future generations.

The lead authors have formed a new independent organization, the Alliance of World Scientists, to be a collective voice on environmental sustainability and human well-being. Scientists who did not sign the warning prior to publication can endorse the published warning by visiting that website.

The hope is that the paper and long list of signatories will help ignite widespread public concern, debate, and action to address these global environment and climate issues. By reversing these negative trends, we can make great progress for the sake of humanity and the planet on which we depend.

Featured Image Credit: “Grazing deer herd” by Johan Mouchet. CC0 via Unsplash.

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Franz Brentano: 100 years after

Franz Brentano died on the 17 of March 1917. His main work Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1874) combines an Aristotelian view of the mind with empiricist methodology inspired by the likes of William Hamilton and John Stuart Mill. Brentano’s philosophical program was to show that every concept can ultimately be derived from perceptions: he was a concept empiricist. In Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, the program is applied to the concept of the mental in general, as well to as notions of particular mental phenomena. When one takes Brentano’s empirical standpoint, one relies on consciousness or inner perception as an empirical source of knowledge.

In Psychology Brentano claimed that intentionality is the feature that all and only mental phenomena have. This thesis captured the imagination of several generations of philosophers. So what is intentionality? Consider Brentano’s own illustration to get the initial idea: In presentation something is presented, in judgement something is affirmed or denied, in love loved, in hate hated, in desire desired.

A presentation presents something; it is ‘about’ or ‘of’ something. But the scare quotes signal uneasiness. Post-Brentano, philosophers have tried various ways to sharpen our understanding of intentionality in order to defend his thesis. Brentano himself assumed that intentionality is unanalyzable, but since it is given in consciousness we can have ‘first-hand experience’ of it. You come to know what redness is by looking at red things and attending to their colour; you come to know what intentionality is by recalling your mental acts and attending to them. This reading of Brentano dissolves some problems of intentionality, but is your wondering who won the lottery really in the same or even in a similar sense ‘of an object’ as your visual perception of the tree in your garden?

If intentionality is so hard to get a grip on, why engage philosophically with Brentano’s work now? Because his philosophy of mind has more to offer than Brentano’s Thesis. Let me highlight two important features that contrast fruitfully with contemporary views in the philosophy of mind.

First, Brentano worked out an Aristotle-inspired metaphysics of what a conscious life is. Is my current conscious life a collection of activities or one activity? Consider an example. In the opera you see and hear the performers at the same time. Brentano’s thesis of the unity of consciousness is that, at a time, seeing and hearing are not two distinct mental acts or activities, but one act that is directed toward several distinct objects. If one becomes conscious of seeing and hearing, the number of objects of one mental act, not the number of mental acts, increases. This implies that one mental act can be jointly of, for example, visibilia, audibilia and itself.

While in the early 2000s self-representationalist views of consciousness had a comeback, Brentano’s original argument for this metaphysics, as well as his particular development of it, has not been properly appreciated. Brentano’s arguments encourage us to free ourselves of the prejudice that a mental act that presents us with several objects must be composed of several distinct acts that each have one object, or have a number of different contents. By taking Brentano’s arguments seriously we gain a new perspective on the metaphysics of consciousness.

Second, Brentano applied his metaphysics to pleasure, arguably the most important mental acts from the standpoint of practical philosophy. He conceived of pleasure as the love or liking of an activity, not, as contemporary authors propose, a desire for sensations. More generally, the primitives of Brentano’s philosophy of mind are presentation, judgment, and love and hate. In contrast, many contemporary philosophers work out a psychology based on belief and desire.

Brentano had guts: he would challenge philosophical orthodoxy again and again. The potential of Brentano’s heterodox ideas has not yet been fully realized. I hope philosophers will take note and be motivated to explore it further.

Featured image credit: Opera by Ricard Urgell,1922, Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

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English usage guides

My own collection of usage guides (see image below). I’ve collected quite a few of them since the start of the Bridging the Unbridgeable project in 2011. The aim of the project is to study usage guides and usage problems in British and American English, as well as attitudes to disputed usages like the split infinitive, the placement of only, the flat adverb, and many more. I scavenged every second-hand book shop, not only in Cambridge where I was spending a sabbatical at the time, but, once back home, also in Leiden, where the project set off, and I browsed the internet and online book sites as well. Colleagues who heard about the project presented me with their copies of Fowler’s Modern English Usage, glad to be rid of them, they said. Someone even brought me a box filled with books from her late father’s library, which contained an abridged version of The King’s English and a copy of An A.B.C. of English Usage by Treble and Vallins.

A collection of usage guides. Image courtesy of Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade.

Soon I had three copies of Strunk and White’s Elements of Style, four Fowlers, and three copies of Partridge’s Usage and Abusage. But I also came to possess more unique copies of usage guides, such as a first edition of Plain Words by Sir Ernest Gowers, found in the Amnesty Bookshop in Mill Road in Cambridge along with a later edition of his ABC of Plain Words. Particularly prized are my copies (bought online and both also first editions) of Seth T. Hurd’s Grammatical Corrector and the anonymous Five Hundred Mistakes of Daily Occurrence. These were very likely the first and second American usage guides ever to published, in 1847 and 1856, respectively. And I also own a copy of Use and Abuse of English by Rosaline Masson, very possibly the first female – British – usage guide writer. One of my copies of Partridge’s Usage and Abusage proved to be inscribed by the author himself. The book’s owner we were able to identify as Conrad van Hoewijk, the first newsreader in the history of Dutch television – what a special copy to have found.

A copy of Partridge’s Usage and Abusage. Image courtesy of Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade.

All these books, as the pictures testify, survived the scanner we used to compile the HUGE database of usage guides and usage problems. For this purpose we would have had to cut off their spines and covers – to destroy them, in other words. We filled the database in different ways, drawing on less rare copies, later reprints, and pdfs. The database includes 77 British and American usage guides and from these a selection of 123 usage problems, mostly grammatical ones. Most of what is in HUGE (subject to copyright restrictions) is generally available (access granted upon request), and we presented the database to the public in 2014 at the Cambridge English Usage (Guides) Symposium.

Speakers at the symposium included John Allen (author of the BBC News Style Guide), Deborah Cameron (author of Verbal Hygiene), linguist David Crystal, “Grammar Girl” Mignon Fogarty, Rebecca Gowers (who had recently published a revised edition of her great-grandfather Sir Ernest Gowers’s Plain Words), lexicographer Robert Ilson, linguist and usage guide writer Pam Peters, linguist Geoffrey Pullum, usage guide writer Caroline Taggart, and all the members of the Bridging the Unbridgeable project. Last month a collection with the papers by most of the speakers at the symposium came out and should any readers of this blog post wish to part with their copies of usage guides now that the HUGE database is available for elaborate advice and the study of usage problems: feel free to pass them on to us. We would be very happy to have them, but please, no more Strunk and Whites, Fowlers, or Partridges, unless of course they are first editions or signed copies.

And, finally: we’re often asked if the usage guides had any effect on actual usage, or, in other words, whether they were ever used at all. These are questions I will be dealing with in a separate study, but I can say here – spoiler alert! – that they definitely were, though sometimes in rather unexpected ways, as the fly leaf of my copy of Five Hundred Mistakes illustrates.

Copy of five hundred mistakes. Image courtesy of Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade.

Featured image: “Open pages library book” by Hermann. CCo via Pixabay .

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Connecting clinical presence and clinical knowledge in music therapy

In all clinical practices, students must learn to make meaning of clinical information such as, “What does it mean that the client said this or did that? What is the client’s body saying when it does or does not do this?” For music therapy students, there is the additional consideration of music, namely “What does it mean when the client plays music like this? What does it mean when the client hears this music like that?”

This has led me to wonder how music therapy students learn to make meaning of music therapy sessions, and how I can best support them in this learning process as an educator. In a recent study, I analyzed student observational logs written following clinical experiences in various healthcare settings, and identified teaching/learning concepts related to these efforts.

The results indicated that students worked to develop skills along two tracks. One track was “Music Therapy Treatment”, which included concepts related to assessment and treatment planning. Here, students learned how to understand clients’ needs in the context of both treatment and their relationship to music. Relatedly, the second track was “How to Be a Music Therapist”. This involved students in learning how to be present in client sessions so that they can respond therapeutically and musically to client responses.

As these two tracks developed, the relationship between them became apparent, and I became aware of how I had been teaching each separately without stressing their interrelatedness. For instance, treatment planning supports the pre-session development of clinical intentions based on client needs expressed in prior sessions, while being present supports in-session development of clinical intentions based on client needs expressed in the here-and-now. One can inform the other given that they focus, from different vantage points, on how treatment can be shaped in response to client needs.

Because of this complementary relationship, the tracks need to be taught side-by-side in both the classroom and clinical setting so that students can learn to make connections between them. The two questions I regularly ask myself now are (1) “How do we help students gain assessment and treatment knowledge, make meaning of it, and use it to inform what they do from moment-to-moment in clinical sessions?” and (2) “How do we help students have conscious understanding of this process so that they can articulate what they see when watching an experienced professional and what they do when they enter into professional work?”

One answer is to continue to develop, and integrate into educational processes, conceptual language that students can relate to their clinical experiences. Familiar words like awareness, intention, rationale, and structuring can support them to make connections between “Music Therapy Treatment” and “Being a Music Therapist”.

Piano by Stevepb. CC0 public domain via Pixabay.

For example, one music therapy student used a practicum log as an opportunity to independently make these connections. After leading an instrumental improvisation music therapy session in an in-patient behavioral health setting, that student wrote the following:

“I tried to establish clear downbeats with the drum [intervene to structure the session], but it was difficult to hear in that room [awareness of environment]. So, I switched to a tambourine [intervene to structure the session] to try and establish a consistent pulse the clients could hear and lock into [rationale for intervention]. I was hoping that over time, the tempo would stabilize and the clients would entrain into a rhythmic groove, which usually creates a positive experience for clients [intention for intervention].”

Intuitively, the student used awareness of the environment to develop an intention for structuring the session. Had the student been taught conceptual language that provided a framework for considering how in-session interventions and treatment planning related however, the student’s last sentence might have been written something more like this:

It was my intention to help the clients stabilize the tempo so that as they played in time together they might feel a sense of connection to supportive community [objective level intention].

As such, the assignment might have deepened the student’s understanding of the ways in which the student’s in-session interventions related directly to the student’s pre-session treatment planning. This being the case, using terms such as those identified above may help students think more conceptually about their clinical work, which in turn may support them to more clearly articulate the music therapy processes, which in turn may allow them to more efficiently learn to confidently lead sessions.

Ultimately, the takeaway is that clinical practitioners not only must know about clinical treatment but also must make flexible use of that knowledge while being present with clients. The more students are taught to integrate their knowledge about treatment with their knowledge about presence in clinical practice, the more they will understand what to do from moment-to-moment when working with clients. Using conceptual language to teach students about these two aspects of practice will provide them with ways to make these important connections.

Featured image credit: Guitar by freestocks-photos. CC0 public domain via Pixabay.

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Race, gender, and flash photography

The cover of Flash! shows a smiling African-American woman, who holds a Graflex Speed Graphic camera. Clamped to the camera is a flash gun in the form of a thick column, topped by a flash bulb filled with crumpled aluminium foil, and a reflector shield. The flash bulb, invented at the very end of the 1920s, was rapidly adopted by both professional and amateur photographers, since it was far easier and less unpredictable to use than the tray of explosive powder that preceded it. If the metal post on which it sits looks strangely familiar, that’s because, repurposed, it was turned into Luke Skywalker’s retrofuturistic lightsaber in Star Wars. The star of this particular image, however, is less the photographic equipment than the woman who holds it. She signals the intertwined presence of race, gender, and flash photography.

Found in the archives of the International Center of Photography, New York, this hand-coloured photograph can be dated – by technology and fashion – to the mid to late 1930s. Most likely it was taken for an advertisement, probably for photographic equipment. I’m especially interested in the image, however, not because of the technological specifics of camera and flash gun, but because of its human subject and what she signifies. Notably, she is depicted behind the camera, holding it up proudly: she is thus a potential user of this very up-to-date equipment, and not merely the object of the viewer’s gaze – even if, of course, using an attractive woman in an advertisement was designed to pull in the prospective purchaser. Her confident openness suggests that she, and by extension the camera, are ready for action, and that the camera will be easy to use – conveying technological simplicity through showing a woman photographer had been a cliché of advertisements and photographic manuals since Kodak brought out their Brownie camera in the late nineteenth century.

At the same time, this particular camera is manifestly not a domestic device. The camera, with its flash attachment, was the instrument of choice for press photographers at the time. Weegee, the New York photographer of crime scenes, arrests and night-time streets, was famously inseparable from his Speed Graphic, and for firing off the flash to expose people’s transgressions and shocked expressions. Women photographers could be just as aggressive as Weegee in their use of flash. Margaret Bourke White had no compunction in flashing light into people’s private moments, whether recording some Holy Rollers at worship, or trying to get a shot of Gandhi’s assassinated body. Eager to grab a newsworthy image, or to sum up poverty through a portrait, she showed none of the concern with situating people within the intimate details of their material surroundings that was the hallmark of an earlier documentary photographer, Jessie Tarbox Beals, a notable, and largely pre-flashbulb flash photographer of tenement life (very much in the tradition of Jacob Riis) and of bohemian New York.

Unidentified Photographer, [Unidentified Woman with Camera], ca. 1935. Courtesy International Center of Photography, Daniel Cowin Collection, Museum Purchase, 2005 (437.2005) . Used with permission.

In the documentary photography of the 1930s, particularly that conducted under the auspices of the Farm Security Administration, African-Americans were regularly depicted – sometimes as living in decrepit tenements, sometimes in tarpaper shacks, but just as frequently shown in their gleaming kitchens, or jitterbugging in clubs. Gordon Parks was to become the first African-American staff photographer for Life magazine in 1948 (working for them until 1972), but earlier, working for the FSA, he produced a visually eloquent series of images of Ella Watson, an office cleaner in Washington D.C. reading to her grandchildren; sitting with her adopted daughter – the flash bouncing brightly off the polished furniture, mirrors, and memorabilia.

Raising the topic of Black respectability returns us to the image of the African-American woman holding a Graflex Speed Graphic. It makes me wonder whether the photographer was working for an advertising company who expressly targeted the rising number of Black middle class consumers and photographic professionals. Such people – members of the so-called “talented tenth,” to use the term popularized by W. E. B. Du Bois in the early twentieth century to designate an African-American leadership class, formed the readers and contributors of Flash – a news magazine of the late 1930s that offered a particularly vibrant view of Black photography, culture, news items, and social events. Its name was chosen to evoke speed, immediacy, modernity.

Yet – and Flash was not alone among Black-aligned periodicals and newspapers here – it also showed a very different side of African-American life in this still-segregated, divided society. In particular, lynching images, when shot at night, invariably showed the hanging black body gleaming with an uncanny whiteness. This association of flash with revealing – and, for those racists who circulated these images as postcards, reveling in – inhumanity played a major role in the abhorrence some African-Americans, such as the writer Ralph Ellison, had for this invasive light that brought terrible and unwanted visibility.

But this is not the message of the image I’ve been considering. This woman, and the camera equipment that she holds, speaks to optimism, to a future of active participation for both women and African-Americans. The associations work in two directions. The newly-invented flash bulb and the Speed Graphic camera stand for a shiningly modern society, one that valued newness, communication, brightness – characteristics decidedly at odds with the continuing realities of the Great Depression. In turn, however, the flash bulb borrows its sense of modernity from the vision of a future offered by the figure in the image. Yet as always, the idealism found in advertising needs to be set alongside the full complexity and contradictions of lived social conditions. In a broader, documentary sphere, flash played a significant role in illuminating these.

Featured image credit: close up of vintage camera by Pixabay. Public domain via Pexels.

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