Michael J. Kramer's Blog, page 16

Run On Sentence

tobi haslett on the motive energies of ideal writing.

A sentence can be a very complicated machine that should nevertheless run. Some people have decided to recuse themselves from the responsibility to make sure that the machine runs. And then there are some people who care so much about making the machine run that the task it performs is too simple. Ideally, a sentence or paragraph will aim for something sophisticated—and actually get there.

— Tobi Haslett, “Violent Antagonisms,” a conversation with Jessica Swoboda, The Point, 17 May 2022

For a Synesthetic Sound Studies

whatever forms they take, artifacts are full of information, of ephemeral moments in the past that packed a punch then, and, interpretively, still do now, in the present. a more imaginative phenomenology of how we perceive them can feed better ways that we preserve them—and vice-versa.

A short video talk for Sound Submissions 4: Developing Infrastructure to Preserve Sound Panel at the Radio Preservation Task Force Conference 2023: A Century of Broadcasting—Preservation and Renewal.

Sound recordings are worth preserving in of themselves, of course, as artifacts that help us access and study the ephemeral past, but they are also important because they offer the opportunity to think about how we analyze all types of materials. Listening better can help us look better, perceive better, preserve better, and analyze better. Particularly as so many artifacts converge in the more ductile and transposable form of digital code, shifting us to the sonic register accentuates surprising new paths to understanding what our artifacts have to say about the past.

I certainly found this to be the case in my current research on the Berkeley Folk Music Festival. A 30,000-plus artifact archive of a folk music festival that took place between 1958 and 1970 on the campus of the University of California offered enormous possibilities for documenting and studying an important, but underappreciated, event in the history of the 1960s folk music revival. As a music festival, here was a sonic event that was temporary but immersive, casual but also in its festive way very communal—an event that was full of the kinds of sensory, ephemeral experiences that are so often the stuff of living yet can so oddly fade from the historical record. Yet despite the fact that the Berkeley Festival was broadcast on the radio a number of times, and that its founder and director started out by hosting a radio show, there was, sadly, very little audio preserved from the event. What did exist in the archive, however, was a robust written and visual record, particularly over 10,000 photographs of the event.

As we digitized the collection and began to consider how to interpret it, the lack of preserved audio, of saved sound, got me to thinking about a strange question: does a sound studies approach have something to offer us even when we have few sound artifacts? To be sure, we can look to the many clues to sonic experience and its historical meanings embedded in visual artifacts: who is performing, what instrument are they using, what size and acoustic qualities did the spaces have, how is the audience reacting, what amplification systems are documented in photographs? And much more.

Yet I found this not to be enough. Why do we only think about sound as sound and image as image, particularly as artifacts all become digitized and in fact exist now, at the material level, in the same form: as computerized code, and really at the most basic level as on-and-off electronic pulsations? As scholars from Jonathan Sterne to Viet Erlmann to Emily Thompson have taught us, the senses were not always understood to be so discrete from each other anyway. Now, even as we think of our sensoria as separated into five completely different realms, the things we sense to, as it were, make sense of the past—which is to say the artifacts—in fact themselves grow more integrated as digital material. What if we started to preserve and analyze them in a more synesthetic spirit?

I began to wonder as I looked over the marvelous photographs of the Berkeley Folk Music Festival in digitized form, what might a photograph sound like? What if we insisted on running our silent artifacts through sonic filters to try to amplify their details, their qualities, what they have to tell us out loud about their silent preservations of the ephemeral past? What if we adopted sound not just as a mode of preservation, but also as a mode of analysis itself? What if we not only used our artifacts to “glimpse” the past, but also to hear it?

In the last few years, informed by the question of what digital humanities approaches can do that other modes of preservation, access, and analysis cannot do, I have been starting to try to map out this strange notion of listening to images. Might the convergence of artifacts into digital code allow us to transit among different sensorial outputs of their data? How might computational means of more inventive interpretation result, for example, from asking what a visual artifact’s data sound like. Pixel brightness, shapes and morphologies, measurements of bodily or spatial relationships: a photograph captures many aspects of a past moment. We can see these, but sometimes we look so much, so often, that we don’t see what is right before our eyes, or even what be hidden from our eyes but caught by the camera lens, like the infamous dead body in the photograph from the film Blowup. Re-representing visual forms sonically might offer better unveilings of evidence by asking us to move between what we hear in visual data and what we see.

Image sonification adds to our analytic repertoire in two ways. First, it alerts us to the representational quality of the artefactual record. After all, photographs are already bizarre technological feats worthy of close philosophical attention, as anyone who has spent time with, say, Barthes’ Camera Lucida, learns. They are at once a moment from the past and a fictive indexing of that moment. Instead of bemoan this fact—that our empirical visual record is in fact constituted by representations—let’s make the most of it. Not just: you have to see it to believe it, but also, maybe, you have to hear it to analyze it fully. Making sense of something means using al the senses. A synesthetic approach.

My early, rudimentary explorations of image sonification have made for very strange sonic experiences. Sometimes even the feeling of: what’s that? Or, that’s it? But, I have also found also that these experiments, by disorienting the senses, also perhaps reorient. For instance, a sonification of Mance Lipscomb performing at the 1963 Berkeley Folk Music Festival, the second time he appeared at the event, alerted me to how one might more robustly interpret the image’s emphasis on his silhouette in front of an audience listening intently to him. When I sonified the image in a very simple way, using Michel Rouzic’s Photosounder app to produce pink noise from the pixel density, scanned left to right across the photograph, the staticky noise when quieter when it reached Mance Lipscomb’s silhouetted body. Here, I realized, quiet had something to say.

Lipscomb, who arrived at Berkeley first in 1961 and returned two years later, was making some noise. He was singing center stage. This African-American sharecropper from rural Navasota, Texas, leapt across social classes and locations, during the height of the folk revival and also of the modern African-American civil rights movement. And yet he was something of an enigma, a blank space onto which the more middle-class, primarily white audiences of the folk revival could project their own feelings and fantasies. The photograph captured this negotiation of space, place, power, and beauty—of the fraught but potent efforts to remake social connections in an American society wracked by racism and other ills—but as for me, I didn’t realize or really see this until I heard it. Hearing sonic static helped me see better.

This very early example of image sonification experimentation does not blow me away, mind you. It goes by quick, it’s suggestive not decisive. But, so what? It was more in the process of making it and listening to it, experimenting and exploring, and in preserving various new iterations of the image sonically that my analysis sharpened. Here is a look…and a listen [image sonification].

Maybe a little too weird for many tastes, I know, but for me, seeing and hearing, silence and noise, stillness and motion, together can spark new insights, and, we might say, insounds. Our artifacts, whatever forms they take, are full of information, of ephemeral moments in the past that packed a punch then, and, interpretively, still do now, in the present—if we remain alert to their forms and to a more imaginative phenomenology of how we might perceive them. Image sonification is just one of a number of approaches we might investigate to develop a more synesthetic sound studies: one could fuse visual and sonic data from various sources to create mini-filmic documentaries and pay attention to how images and sounds converge; one could even glitch images and sounds together to let computational serendipity generate new perceptions and interpretations. As surrealism has taught us: from distortions can come clarifications!

Finally, new ways of seeing visual data of the past by hearing it also presents some questions about the relationship of analysis to preservation in the digital era. What is it we should preserve or save now? The original artifacts, to be sure, but also, as media archeologists teach us, perhaps the layers of representation and subsequent exploration as well. In the Mance Lipscomb case, we might develop mechanisms for preserving the original photo and its technological and social context, but we might also find ways of preserving the interpretive work that arises out of the digitization of the photo. The code of the digital image, yes, but also, perhaps, subsequent sonifications of it: the “original” artifact, but also the ways this or any any original artifact is always also the choices made about how to re-represent it. There is no one true representation here to discover and preserve, only an endlessly generative array of re-representational possibilities. That is not a truth about the empirical record to fear, necessarily, but rather one we can embrace and cultivate, I would argue. Analysis and preservation go together.

The ephemerality of sound alerts us to this need for creative and effective preservation and analysis as connected endeavors. Sound fades away, but sound is also profoundly potent and immersive. Sound, like history itself, is time vibrating perceptually. Sound is in the very ether, on the air, waving to us as it recedes into the universe, into the past. Sound never ends even as it disappears into memories. Our task, if we listen to the call close enough, is to hear sound soundly, every which way it transits and moves, even when it is to be found, synesthetically, in material and artifacts such as images.

Thanks. Questions? Comments? mkramer@brockport.edu.

Rovings

april 2023 edition.Stanley Whitney, There Will Be Song, 2023.SoundsTheo Bleckmann, Alicia Olatuja, Dan Tepfer & David Hajdu, The Parsonage: True Tales of Love and Anarchy at 64 East 7th StreetExploding Star Orchestra/Rob Mazurek, Lightning Dreamers Ricardo Palma, ConjuntoVarious Artists, Longing for the Past: The 78 RPM Era in Southeast Asia Dust to Digital Various Artists, Listen All Around: The Golden Age of Central and East African MusicVarious Artists, Joe Bussard Presents the Year of Jubilo: 78 RPM Recordings of Songs from the Civil WarThe Carolina Buddies, “The Story That the Crow Told Me”Founding Son podcastAmerican History Tellers, Season 01, “The Cold War” podcast“Realignments, with Timothy Shenk,” Know Your Enemy podcast, 27 February 2023 “Bob Dylan’s America, with Will Epstein,” Know Your Enemy podcast, 5 April 2023 The Turning: Room of Mirrors podcast, Season 2WordsPhilip Balboni, “In Marx’s Novel,” LRB Blog, 7 April 2023Ben Burgis, “I’m on Strike at Rutgers to Fight the Uberification of Higher Education,” Jacobin, 11 April 2023Mathias Fuelling, Josh Stern, “Florida in Philadelphia: The Temple University Strike’s Template for Organizing the Public,” N+1 Online, 14 April 2023Jill Lepore, “The Data Delusion,” New Yorker, 3 April 2023Jonathan Ira Levy, “The Pitfalls of Dollar Hegemony,” Project Syndicate, 14 April 2023Gagosian Quarterly, Spring 2023 John Yau, “Brenda Goodman, Scars and All,” Hyperallergic, 21 February 2023 Louis Bury, “The Physical Labor of Writing: Many writers will tell you that writing is a physical activity. Renee Gladman’s drawings convey that idea in a more visceral, less cerebral way,” Hyperallergic, 2 March 2023Ezra Klein, “The Problem With Everything-Bagel Liberalism,” New York Times, 2 April 2023L.M. Sacasas, “Outsourcing Virtue,” The Point, 22 February 2023Hardeep Dhillon, “How the Fight for Birthright Citizenship Shaped the History of Asian American Families,” Smithsonian Magazine, 27 March 2023V. Jo Hsu, “Republicans’ Hostile Takeover of Higher Education,” The Progressive Magazine, 30 March 2023Adolph Reed, Jr., “The South: The Past, Historicity, and Black American History (Part 1)” and “The South: The Past, Historicity, and Black American History (Part II),” Society for US Intellectual History Blog, 3 and 10 April 2023Adolph Reed, Jr., “The Trouble With Uplift,” The Baffler 41, September 2018 John-Baptiste Oduor, “Segregation’s Sequiturs,” New Left Review 136, July/August 2022 Oliver Whang, “Can Intelligence Be Separated From the Body?,” New York Times, 11 April 2023 John Keane, James Miller, Rafi Youatt, “Is Democracy for Humans Only?,” Public Seminar, 12 April 2023John Semley, “How Weird Was Frank Zappa? Alex Winter’s new documentary about the musician fails to capture his deeply conventional streak,” Critical Mass, New Republic, 26 November 2020Jessica E Teague, “A Story in Sound: The Unpublished Writings of Sidney Bechet,” MELUS, mlad005, 10 April 2023Nick Brumfield, “‘Country Roads’: How John Denver’s Hit Became the World’s Most Popular Song,” expatalachians, 5 March 2019Hannes Alfvén, The Tale of the Big Computer: A VisionJenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention EconomyLaurie Lipton, Drawings Daniel Bessner, “A Bad Breakup: The Discontents of Francis Fukuyama,” The Nation, 17 April 2023James T. Kloppenberg, “Is American Democracy Coming Apart? Redeeming the Promise of Self-Rule,” Commonweal, 4 April 2023Timothy Shenk, “Liberal Commitments: An interview with Michael Walzer on the Struggle for a Decent Politics,” Dissent, 21 March 2023Gabriel Winant, “J. D. Vance Changes the Subject: A senator from the unconscious,” N+1, 10 April 2023Mike Fiorito, Mescalito Riding His White Horse: Inspired by The Musical Adventures of Peter Rowan“Walls”Rosalyn Drexler, Happy Dance @ Garth GreenanThe New Bend @ Hauser & Wirth SomersetRobert Bechtle @ Gladstone GalleryAutumn Knight, Nothing #26: The Potential of Nothing is Everything @ Wallach Art GalleryStanley Whitney, There Will Be Song @ Gagosian Grosvenor Hill, LondonMelvino Garretti, Searching and Listening in My Backyard @ Parker GalleryRichard Van Buren, 1969–70 Revisited @ Parker GalleryRevisiting 5 + 1 @ Paul W. Zuccaire Gallery, SUNY Stony Brook“Stages”King Lear @ National Theater of England Digital, 15 April 2023Ben Butler @ Washington Guild Theater, 16 April 2023Claire Rydell Arcenas, “America’s Philosopher: John Locke in American Intellectual Life” @ Washington History Seminar. 5 April, 2023 Glory Liu, “Adam Smith’s America: How a Scottish Philosopher Became an Icon of American Capitalism” @ Washington History Seminar, 10 April 2023Shawn Fitzgerald Ahern + Emilie Leriche, One & One Other @ BACDigital, 10 April 2023The Irony of an American Historian: A Symposium Remembering Leo Ribuffo @ George Washington University, 21 April 2023Alan Liu, “Reframing the Humanities as Useful” @ The Heart of the Matter at 10: The Past and Present of the Humanities,” National Academy of Arts and Sciences, 29 March 2023

Screens

A Spy Among Friends, MGM+Perry Mason, Season 02

2023 April 28—For A Synesthetic Sound Studies

talk @ radio preservation task force conference 2023: a century of broadcasting— preservation and renewal.

A short video talk for Sound Submissions 4: Developing Infrastructure to Preserve Sound Panel at the Radio Preservation Task Force Conference 2023: A Century of Broadcasting—Preservation and Renewal.

Succession’s Inheritance

the camerawork of carnage on succession.

The real star among the many excellent aspects of Succession is the camerawork. Shaky handheld shots, constant zooms in and out, swooping pans, weird angles—they combine to create a delirious, immersive, almost nauseating aesthetic.

At first, it feels like the camera work is voyeuristic, making the viewer feel as though they are awkwardly not where they are supposed to be, eavesdropping on intimate, nasty family business (and nasty business business too). Yet the more I watch the show, the more the camerawork is not voyeuristic. It is instead oddly participatory. The camera almost makes the viewer another family member in this very dysfunctional family, a part of its closed fictional world.

It closes us in, oddly, by appropriating the camerawork of the reality televison show. Many have noted the inspiration of documentary films, cinéma vérité, and Dogme 95 in the camerwork. I see a different inspiration: The Office, particularly the original British version of the show. That was also a satire, as is Succession. While it was more overtly a comedy, one that ultimately played it sweet below its critique, one might say The Office set the stage (or rather, prepared the lens) for Succession‘s approach.

The Office‘s faux-reality show camerawork created a tone of brutal self-awareness and awkwardness, in which fictional characters became infinitely more fake by pretending to be real for the camera. Here was a new language of painful exposure. The fake reality show brought the glaring falseness of the genre into the glaring spotlight.

Now on Succcession, we have a fictional show that has folded in the camerawork of the fake reality show farce into a kind of Billions or Sopranos-style drama. It’s a new sort of hybrid form of prestige TV (or is it film?) in which we don’t quite know where we are. The disorientation is the point, and it reinforces the writing and acting, which are highly attuned to David Brent levels of self-delusion.

Succession is a show always on the brink of breakdown. The camera signals a knowing wink. It is recognizable as the reality show check-in with the audience, but we are not in a reality show—or even a faux-reality show—anymore. We are in a fully fictional world, yet the camera keeps proposing that it is real. Or maybe it is a fully real world and we keep being reminded that it is fake. Who knows?

Most of all, the use of reality television show camerawork accentuates the dreamy lack of reality. Who are these rich people? Why should we give a shit about them? Maybe we shouldn’t, Succession‘s camerawork repeatedly proposes. Yet even as it throws the viewer to the lions of this cynical, rotten, inbred fictional world, a closed universe which is almost so absurd as to ring true, we cannot escape it.

This is the success of Succession. One longs to get away from the immersive relentlessness of its sneering moral decay, but the teeth keep coming too close for comfort. One hopes to step back from its commanding swirl of foul betrayal, but the dust chokes our throats. We get too near and the camera keeps smacking us around for this, much as all the characters do to each other.

We seek some perch away from the viciousness, some respite from the endless harsh grip of the frame, but the camera won’t let one out of the bloody arena, a theater of cruelty.

Rovings

march 2023 edition.The Raincoats @ White Cube Bermondsey, 17 March 2023.SoundsThe Strata, Seasons 01-03Heart and Soul: An instrument speaking to the infinite, BBC SoundsUncle Dave Macon, Uncle Dave Macon at HomeEd & Ella Haley, Stole From The Throat Of A BirdTime Trout, “Stuck Like Jane Austen”Toxe, The Story of LeonoraAsher Gamedze, From Turbulence And PulseE. Jason Gibbs, three steel plates with chimes and flagpoleVarious Artists, The Art School Dance Goes On : Leeds Post-Punk 1977-84Mac DeMarco, Five Easy Hot DogsRichard Beaudoin, Digital Memory and the ArchiveRichard Beaudoin, MicrotimingsVarious Artists, Masters of the Banjo“A More Perfect Human,” ThroughlineVarious Artists, The Real BahamasThe Persuasions, A cappellaThe Persuasions, The Persuasions Sing U2The Persuasions and Friends, Persuasions of the Dead: The Grateful Dead Sessions“Javier Marias,” Open Book, BBC SoundsWaco Brothers, “In The Dark”The McIntosh County Shouters, Slave Shout Songs from the Coast of GeorgiaWordsTed Olson, “Doc Watson at 100: The virtuoso guitarist brought Appalachian music to a worldwide audience and influenced generations of musicians,” The Conversation, 28 February 2023Hillary Louise Johnson, “Man. Verses. Nature.,” Sactown, September-October 2022Stephen Winick, “Hidden Folklorists: Harry Payne Reeves, the Mysterious Cowboy Singer Daca,” American Folklife Center Blog, Library of Congress, 15 March 2023Joanne McNeil, “A Museum for the Working Class: The Fall River Museum of Contemporary Art offers a place for working-class art without tokenizing or empty gestures of representation,” Dissent, Winter 2023Jayson Greene, “The Untold Story of Elliott Smith’s Teenage Band,” Pitchfork, 2 March 2023 Sara Wexler, “Full-Time Contingent Faculty at New York University Are Trying to Unionize: An Interview with Jacob REMES,” Jacobin, 10 March 2023Elliot Ackerman, “The Arsenal of Democracy Is Reopening for Business,” Atlantic, 9 March 2023Grayson Haver Currin, “The Poignant Music of Melting Ice: Have a Listen,” New York Times, 17 March 2023 Angela Thompson, “‘A credible undertaking’: apathy and anti-apartheid activism at SUNY Brockport,” Safundi, March 2022George Grella, “The Outsider: Allen Lowe Against the Jazz Tradition,” Brooklyn Rail, April 2014 Christopher Newfield, “The Humanities Crisis Is a Funding Crisis,” MLA Newsletter, 10 August 2022Christopher Newfield, “The Perpetual Job Crisis Needs a National Strategy,” MLA Newsletter, 16 November 2022Christopher Newfield, “Post-Automated Luxury Criticism,” MLA Newsletter, 6 January 2023Noam Maggor, “Tax Regimes: An interview with Robin Einhorn,” Phenomenal Worlds, 22 March 2022Bryce Covert, “The Fed’s War on Inflation Is a Class War,” New York Times, 31 March 2023 Terry Tempest Williams, Photographs by Fazal Sheikh, “I Am Haunted by What I Have Seen at Great Salt Lake,” New York Times, 26 March 2023Ben Burgos, “The Invasion of Iraq Wasn’t a “Mistake.” It Was a Crime,” Jacobin, 20 March 2023 Michael Brenes, “A Known and an Unknown War,” Contingent, 20 March 2023Tom Vanderbilt, “The Science of the Perfect Second,” Harpers, April 2024Kensington Laube, Mike Seeger Collection Research Guide, Southern Folklife Collection, Wilson Library, UNC Chapel HillGeorge Murdock, Culture and Society: Twenty-Four EssaysSean Burns, Archie Green: The Making of a Working-Class HeroDavid Lance Goines, The Free Speech Movement: Coming of Age in the 1960sMichael C. Heller, Loft Jazz: Improvising New York in the 1970sLeo G. Mazow, Thomas Hart Benton and the American SoundRon Rosenbaum, The Secret Parts of Fortune: Three Decades of Intense Investigations and Edgy EnthusiasmsKenneth Knabb’s Bureau of Public Secrets website“Walls”Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian, Washington DCSa’dia Rehman, the river runs slow and deep and all the bones of my ancestors / have risen to the surface to knock and click like the sounds of trees in the air @ Wexner Center for the ArtsA.K. Burns, Of space we are… @ Wexner Center for the ArtsStoried Strings: The Guitar in American Art @ Virginia Museum of Fine Art Brenda Goodman, Hop Skip Jump—New Work 2022 @ Sikkema Jenkins & Co.Renee Gladman, Narratives of Magnitude @ Artists SpaceMartin Puryear @ Matthew Marks GalleryFrieda Toranzo Jaeger, Autonomous Drive @ MoMA PS1Blue Space @ Engage Projects “Stages”The Raincoats at White Cube Bermondsey @ White Cube Bermondsey, 17 March 2023 A Conversation with Joni Mitchell @ Library of Congress, 15 March 2023Arlekin Players Theatre, Just Tell No One Play Reading @ Lincoln Center, 6 March 2023 Adolph Reed, Jr. Interviewed by Samir Sonti, The South—Jim Crow and its Afterlives @ The CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies, 6 March 2023Jon Langford @ Judson & Moore Distillery, 19 February 2023Dr. Dalila Scruggs, Sorrow Songs in an Exuberant City: How Manhattan influenced the Guitar Imagery of Elizabeth Catlett @ Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, 18 January 2023Jeff Tweedy, “Please Tell My Brothers” @ Tweedy Show, 14 May 2020Marion Jacobson, Squeeze This: A Cultural History of the Accordion in America @ Library of Congress, 7 May 2013Norman Blake and Tony Rice @ The Birchmere, 17 July 1989ScreensThe ConformistLiaison, Season 01Interview With E.P. Thompson All Creatures Great and Small Doc and Merle Seabreeze Park and Nearby Fun, 1942

Cables to Nowhere

White Collar Blues

shannan clark’s the making of the american creative class: new york’s culture workers and twentieth-century consumer capitalism (new york: oxford university press, 2021).

x-posted from Society for US Intellectual History Book Review.

Shannan Clark has written a subtle history about a curious topic: white-collar unionism. Focusing on an emerging group of professionals—writers, editors, designers, producers, directors, clerks, advertisers, marketers, even some managers—he traces their efforts to organize collectively as they went to work in the blossoming culture industries of New York City. Clark picks up the story during the Great Depression of the 1930s. He then traces the limited successes and ongoing struggles of this wage-earning “creative class” over subsequent decades.

His book serves as a kind of pre-history of today’s “creatives”—those producers of culture laboring in the offices (and virtual spaces) of contemporary, post-industrial consumer capitalism. Clark argues that long before theorists such as Richard Florida wrote paeans to the supposedly rising “creative class” in the twenty-first century, an earlier incarnation fell from power in the twentieth. Its dreams of a different kind of Popular Front social consumerism were largely vanquished by the bosses. Its visions of a higher-quality mass society were constrained by corporate control. Its efforts to organize collectively in order to assert power within the culture industries were compromised. Its ability even to imagine itself as a coherent class of workers became caught up in competing concepts of its identity.[1]

Recent waves of unionization, or at least interest in it, whether they be at digital journalism outlets, among contemporary communications workers of various sorts, and even among engineers in the heart of Silicon Valley, remind us that the issues faced by today’s hipster “creatives” echo those of their forerunners. Will this “New Working Class,” as Barbara and John Ehrenreich imagined it in the 1970s, ultimately picture themselves as having more in common with other workers in service and industry who have turned to unions to improve their lot? Or will “creatives” side more with the managers and corporate overlords who, more than ever, run the show in the culture industries?[2] And where do creative professionals fit in to the larger apparatus of post-industrial capitalist production as well as consumption, anyway? Since their work so often occurs at the hinge between what gets made and what gets consumed, their fate links to a larger history of US social life in and after the twentieth century. Clark’s study sometimes loses sight of these larger stakes and gets bogged down in tales of internecine labor leadership battles, but the book points to the significance of the creative class. This sector of workers may not have been, nor ever be the primary agents of change. They are likely not the vanguard of the revolution. Yet because their hands touch some of the levers of power in a mass consumer society, they continue to be a crucial group within larger social struggles.

At once glamorized artisans and salaried wage earners (or perhaps these days independent contractors in the gig economy), creative workers remain in an important, if ambiguous, place within class hierarchies. Sitting at their desks, drafting tables, and digital consoles in the open office floor plan, their labor shapes what we all come to desire, ponder, and know. They are part of what Pierre Bourdieu once evocatively called “the dominated fractions of the dominant class.”[3] Moreover, their productions are our consumption. In this way, in some sense we are ultimately them and they us. Even as only some of these workers have been able to secure stable livelihoods creating culture, their creative endeavors have rippled far and wide across the United States and the world, informing the collective imagination of consumer capitalism.

Clark knows that the ideational and cultural dimensions of his labor history matter, for his title not only refers to Richard Florida’s trendy twenty-first century analysis, but also to E.P. Thompson’s classic The Making of the English Working Class.[4] Thompson made much of working-class agency and the development of a coherent working-class consciousness; Clark also seeks to connect class to culture in the tradition of Thompsonian social history. The Making of the American Creative Class concentrates on how, over the course of the early twentieth century, white-collar workers in fields such as publishing, broadcasting, advertising, and design came to stand at the “nexus” of both the expansion of consumer capitalism and the transformation of the middle classes. This was an issue of quality as well as quantity. There were not only more of these kinds of workers, but their material conditions, ideas of what constituted the good life, and actions to try to achieve it forged a changing sense of what it meant to be modern. As Clark explains, their “circumstances were often taken as indicative of the working conditions and standard of living of this growing segment of the population”: the middling sort.[5]

Yet as creative workers led the shift of the middle class from a “social grouping of proprietors and independent professionals to one comprised primarily of salaried employees,” they did not find satisfaction. Instead, a contradiction emerged. As their employers in the culture industries increasingly sought “efficiency and rationalization in cultural production,” creative workers themselves, as Clark points out, “struggled to partake in the standard of living promoted through advertising and the media.” Creative workers could not claim “the personal autonomy that was portrayed as a prerogative of middle-class status.”[6] They forged the vision of middle-class modernism, but found themselves, ironically, locked out of it in their own lives as corporate capitalism usurped the modernist vision.

The response? For many, it was to unionize. Particularly during the Great Depression, as jobs disappeared across the culture industries, Clark explains that “thousands of white-collar workers throughout the culture industries organized new unions to improve their terms and conditions of employment through collective action.”[7] Yet because of their particular skills, Clark notes, they also “utilized their creative talents to develop a variety of initiatives, typically sponsored by cooperative, labor, or public patronage, to provide alternatives to America’s culture of consumer capitalism.”[8] Their own crisis of employment, in short, linked to a changing class consciousness among them. Creative workers “enthusiastically backed the relief, reform, and recovery measures of the New Deal, which they hoped would form the basis of a more expansive social-democratic order, with a ‘mixed’ economy that included substantial public provisioning of goods and services.”[9] So too, they “supported the protection of labor rights, and most also favored progress toward racial and gender equality, and international solidarity against fascism.”[10]

Ultimately, creative workers who organized into unions formed a crucial part of the so-called Popular Front, which “aspired to unite procommunists along with noncommunist liberals, progressives, and radicals to press for the realization of these objectives.”[11] The association with communists would subsequently leave many in the creative class’s union movement, and their unions themselves, vulnerable to the anticommunist blacklisting of the Cold War decades. Nonetheless, it also left a legacy of an incomplete political and cultural project that sought to stitch together white and blue collars—to bring together middle- and working-class interests in the name of the larger common good.

Some creative professionals became militant, particularly as the Great Depression intensified. They “came to understand white-collar work as subsumed within an expanding proletariat with revolutionary potential.”[12] Obscured by the later, more dour view of the middling classes and their radical potential put forward in C. Wright Mills’ 1951 book White Collar and other studies after World War II, this contingent imagined creative laborers as part of a larger group of exploited workers caught up in the degradations of capitalism and in need of overthrowing the system. Documents such as the 1932 Culture and the Crisis, a manifesto written by the League of Professional Groups for Foster and Ford and signed by the likes of Lewis Corey, Malcolm Cowley, John Dos Passos, Waldo Frank, Sidney Hook, and Langston Hughes, urged workers in the creative professions to vote for Communist politicians in order to put an end to capitalism and finally be “liberated to perform freely and creatively their particular craft function.”[13] This was the most radical version of creative class consciousness, articulated during the nadir of the Great Depression.

Yet far from all creative workers were keen to foment revolution, or even form unions, as Clark notes. A much “larger contingent” decided that they were not necessarily part of the revolutionary proletariat. They did believe, however, that their interests were “allied with manufacturing workers and the liberal segment of the traditional middle class in support of the New Deal and progressive social change.”[14] This group successfully achieved a push for unionization once the Wagner Act was in place to map out more clear paths toward legal unionization. Ultimately, the mix of radical ideas among some members of the creative class and the more reformist perspectives of others led to white-collar unions that distinguished themselves, sometimes rather condescendingly, from industrial workers; yet they could still, nonetheless, ultimately connect up with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) institutionally and participate in its ethos of industrial unionism.[15]

Whether radical or reformist, white-collar unions emerged among the creative class during the 1930s and 40s. A sizable contingent, however, resisted unionization entirely. As Clark notes, there were still plenty of creative workers who adopted far “narrower conceptions of solidarity within their industry, occupation, or profession” and believed that associations rather than legal unions “furnished a suitable basis for collective action within certain bounds of social propriety.”[16] And there were plenty of creative workers who wanted nothing to do with unions or associations or any form of collectivity at all. They clung to ideals of pre-Great Depression proprietorship or dreamed of joining the managerial ranks above them in the new, large corporate firms increasingly dominating the field. While Clark’s book does not focus intensively on these anti-union sectors of the creative class, he makes sure to point out that “creatives” were never just one uniform group; rather, a cluster of competing and even contradictory visions, actions, pushbacks, successes, and failures constituted the creative class.

Two key issues emerge from Clark’s study. First, Clark is keen to point out the key role women played in the creative industries and in efforts to unionize them. Their presence generated a distinctive form of labor feminism that persisted into the postwar era from its initial 1930 and 1940s Popular Front moment.[17] No less a figure than Betty Friedan herself, the author of The Feminine Mystique and founder of the National Organization for Women, got her start in this milieu.[18] Second, key creative workers imagined their own labor as dedicated to imagining and enacting an alternative type of “social consumerism” in contrast to the corporate consumerism of their bosses. In their version, modernism itself was to be imagined neither as elitist refinement nor mass vulgarity, but rather as the achievement of “their twin ideals of creative autonomy for culture workers and the social-democratic provisioning of goods” for all.[19] This alternate vision would emerge most boldly with the work of the Design Laboratory and then among the designers, editors, and writers at the Consumers Union, the radical predecessor to the much more conventional postwar magazine Consumer Reports. Behind many of the New Left social movements that erupted in the 1960s and 70s lurked these earlier creative-class aspirations and efforts to forge a different kind of capitalist society infused with social democratic values and practices.

The failure of the Popular Front, the harsh rise of the Red Scare, the compression of blue-collar and white-collar wages due to successes among industrial workers to raise their earnings (a great irony!), and the growing power of corporations in post-World War II America meant that class-consciousness gave way increasingly to a more generalized “postcapitalist liberalism.”[20] Many creative professionals “increasingly framed their critiques and proposed remedies in new terms, emphasizing the potential for the transcendence rather than the socialization of existing relations of production and exchange.”[21] They believed that they could still help consumers with individual choice, but they gave up the Popular Front ghost, by and large, on reshaping consumer capitalism in any decisively socialized or collective way.

Yet, according to Clark, the Red Scare’s blacklist itself, Clark argues, registered the potency of the creative class’s more radical dimensions coming out of the 1930s and 40s. Blacklisting was not directed at workers merely because of their supposedly communist political affiliations, he contends, but also because of their advocacy of a broader Popular Front “desire to stimulate the imaginative power of ordinary people as they interpreted and constructed the meanings of the cultural products that they encountered, and to harness it to challenge the pervasive influence of consumer capitalism.”[22] Never mind if a creative worker was an outright socialist, their capacity to deliver socialist vibes was threatening to corporate capitalism’s grip on postwar American society. The creative class’s capacities to shape mass consumer society had to be contained.

By the 1960s, the creative class had mostly given up on the more radical politics of its heyday a few decades earlier. To make this point, Clark starts and ends his book with two very different vignettes. He begins with a vibrant protest against NBC at Rockefeller Center in New York City, led in part by Myra Jordan, a secretary in the news division of CBS who headed the Radio Guild, a fledging union during the 1940s. He ends with the story of advertising copywriter Julian Koenig just a few blocks away on Madison Avenue. Koenig flirted with unionization, but then turned to a highly successful, Mad Men-like career. Koenig penned nothing less than the infamous 1960s Volkswagen “Think Small” advertising campaign, which sold the fantasy of a kind of ersatz-proletarianism even as he and other creative professionals turned their backs on the real thing. Here is a history that arcs from proletarian revolution to spiritual evolution, class consciousness to counterculture, unionization to etherealization, welfare to wellness. What started out as big thinking now strived only to “think small.” Any hopes for collectivist transformation receded in the puff of consumerist transgression.

This was not the case for everyone though. Clark notes at the end of The Making of the American Creative Class that it was mostly women and ethnic minorities, whose identities continued to deny them full access to or equality in the creative professions, who pressed on with the most strident forms of union activism by the 1970s. Their limited successes were undercut, however, not only by the economic downturn of the United States—New York City in particular—at the time, but also ironically by the seniority system many unions themselves embraced, which only extenuated inequities based on identity (gender, race) in the creative work force. Meanwhile, fierce counterattacks by corporations against anyone who might try to unionize a white-collar shop as well as the successful weakening of existing unions such as the Newspaper Guild by 1980s moguls like Rupert Murdoch further undermined union activity in the creative professions. Conservative politicians successfully combined misogynist and racist sentiments with antiworker ones, further erasing the legacies of the creative class unions and the consciousness they forged in the Popular Front era of the 1930s and 40s.

By the early twenty-first century, Richard Florida could claim that a creative class was on the rise, seemingly out of nowhere. Any municipality worth its aging infrastructure had to cater to the savory-scone-and-mocha-latte set. Yet in his study, he never imagined that they were once, or in some cases still, a unionized workforce. They were now only atomized individuals seeking cool places to work and play. Some twenty years after Florida’s study, the people working behind the counter of the local hipster coffee shop might well be striving to unionize. So too might be the people delivering the tasty treats to the café. So too might be the people who made those treats, or grew the crops to make them, or assembled them into products for purchase. In some cases, even the customers sitting in the café, working on this or that creative project on their laptops, might be pondering whether a union could help their careers and improve their lives. Whether all these different types of workers can see their shared interests across contemporary divisions of service, industrial, and creative modes of labor remains to be seen. And whether, from there, they can return us to a larger vision of “social capitalism,” or even socialism itself, remains a job to be creatively enacted.

[1] Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class (New York: Basic Books, 2002).

[2] Barbara and John Ehrenreich, “The Professional-Managerial Class,” Radical America 11, 2 (March-April 1977), 7-32; Barbara and John Ehrenreich, “The New Left and the Professional-Managerial Class,” Radical America 11, 3 (May-June 1977), 7-24.

[3] Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (1979; English edition, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 214.

[4] Edward Palmer Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1963).

[5] Shannan Clark, The Making of the American Creative Class: New York’s Culture Workers and Twentieth-Century Consumer Capitalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), 4-5.

[6] Clark, 4-5.

[7] Clark, 6-7.

[8] Clark, 6-7.

[9] Clark, 6-7.

[10] Clark, 6-7.

[11] Clark, 6-7.

[12] Clark, 7.

[13] Clark, 51.

[14] Clark, 7-8, 13.

[15] Clark, 7-8, 13.

[16] Clark, 8.

[17] Clark, 9, 13, 230.

[18] Clark, 217. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: WW Norton & Company, 1963).

[19] Clark, 174.

[20] Clark, 300. In making this argument, Clark explicitly builds on Howard Brick’s Transcending Capitalism: Visions of a New Society in Modern American Thought (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015).

[21] Clark, 304.

[22] Clark, 307.

2023 March 23—Folk Music Data

alan lomax’s cantometrics, harry smith’s anthology of american folk music & the cold war american computational imagination @ contemporary history institute, ohio university.Left: Alan Lomax, ca. 1963. Photo: Bettmann/Corbis. Right: Harry Smith with this “brain drawings,” ca. 1950. Photo: Hy Hirsh, courtesy of Harry Smith Archives.

In the decades after World War II, folk music collided with computation in the works of celebrated documentarian Alan Lomax and eccentric artist Harry Smith.

In the early 1960s, Lomax’s Cantometrics project sought to measure musical performance styles around the world in a massively ambitious, cross-correlated study that fed over 5,000 coded musical samples into the mainframes at Columbia University’s Bureau for Applied Social Research to identify how music linked functionally to specific social contexts and diffused across time and space, retaining core qualities while adjusting to new conditions. Contending that folk music performance style was the key factor rather—how people sang rather than what they sang—Lomax argued that performance style was quite redundant, in the best sense: it tended to produce shared expectations in a social group to establish communal communication and coordination for collective music-making. Lomax believed that the stability of music-making across anthropologically defined groups around the world enabled him to analyze expressive cultural aesthetics and their social implications. It was an audacious project, and met with many objections by ethnomusicologists and anthropologists when Lomax released his findings. Yet, Cantometrics lives on, its effort to harness computation for measuring culture as data in ways that could register both continuity and change remains tantalizing. What can the way people sing tell us about how they live? Eventually, Lomax’s Cantometrics data and analysis became the Global Jukebox, a CD-Rom that now resides on the World Wide Web and Internet streaming services such as Pandora even made use of Lomax’s ideas to design their recommendation algorithms of musical association.

Smith, meanwhile, edited the 1952 Folkways Records Anthology of American Folk Music, a compilation of pre-World War II commercial 78 recordings, mostly so-called “hillbilly” sounds, “race” records, and other “ethnic” genres. Shifting away from anthropological and ethnographic organizing principles, he instead employed computational strategies descended from his studies of neo-Platonism, neo-Pythagorean concepts, alchemy, theosophy, and other esoteric traditions to create a kind of kaleidoscopic vision of folk music in the United States. He never used digital computers themselves; rather, Smith applied a kind of proto-cybernetic strategy to the Anthology, producing a strange, almost magical album organized into four volumes (one finally seeing the light of day posthumously) by the elements of earth, water, fire, and air. In what amounted to a bootlegged recording of commercial recordings on whose cover he placed a Theodore de Bry image of a celestial monochord that he lifted from Robert Fludd’s 1617 book De Musica Mundana, Smith sought to realign the crassly material, castoff, surplus-store throwaways of an earlier US vernacularity with the spiritual transcendence of the heavens through computational re-tuning. The Early Modern scientist and alcehmist Fludd was a key inspiration. Not only was Fludd interested in numerically calculating how the earthly and the godly aligned along the monochord, he was also fascinated by perpetual motion machines. One might think of Smith’s Anthology as just such an invention: an endlessly recomputing algorithm of sounds that spat out unfixed, generative results. Here was cultural heritage as activated search engine, always modulating its feedback based on infinite recombinations, unexpected connections, and unanticipated potential.

Harbingers of our own digital era, in which we increasingly treat culture as data, Lomax and Smith help us notice how what scholar Ross Cole calls the “folkloric imagination” collided with what we might describe as the postwar computational imagination, which arose in the wake of the digital computer’s emergence. In the process, Lomax’s Cantometrics and Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music offer intriguing implications for how we consider issues of technology, tradition, information, and the concept of authenticity itself both then and now.

Talkin’ Bout Which Generations?

considering second-half baby boomers, gen x & the stakes of generational identities with bruce handy’s new yorker essay & richard linklater’s dazed & confused.

I’d like to quit thinking of the present, like right now, as some minor, insignificant preamble to somethin’ else.

— Cynthia, Dazed & Confused

A nice essay by Bruce Handy in the New Yorker on “second-half baby boomers” in the 1970s uses Richard Linklater’s 1993 film Dazed & Confused as a starting point on the finer gradations of American generational politics in the post-WWII era up to our own time. The essay has me thinking a lot about the clunkiness of generational identities and the way they exist, but also don’t exist. From the muck of birthdays and the march of history, generational identities emerge, but they are always contested, and how they get shaped and formulated has enormous consequences. This is one place where the seemingly innocent musings of pop culture collide with serious business of politics and more.

For instance, one could include “second-half baby boomers” with Gen X to create a very different narrative of post-Vietnam War America. I recall Richard Linklater’s films Slacker and Dazed & Confused resonating with Gex X during the years that punk broke. Indeed, the film was shot during the early 1990s and in this sense it is a mediation between the historical moment of naming Gen X via Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and the portrayals of the 1970s as the 1960s years of the barricades gave way to a kind of kitschy but beautiful new youth culture.

At the superficial level, there is much in common between pet rocks and grunge flannel in the film as both fictional historical text and in its early 1990s context. But the superficial is hardly superficial at all. There is also much in common between Linklater’s brilliant “second-half baby boomer” meditations on his youth in the 1970s and a sense of post-Cold War confusion. Everything still (even to this day) falls under the sway of the 60s generation, with its framework of youth culture and protest, its New Left and New Right binaries, its confusing swirl of rebellion and cooptation as the Great Society came up against the limits of Cold War liberalism in Vietnam and the expansive adjustability of consumer capitalism in Woodstock Nation. Yet if you peek below the mushroom cloud and the Napalm smoke, beyond the psychedelic light show and the LSD hallucinations, a different kind of effort appears in the wake of the 1960s: a smaller cohort of Americans trying to figure out what to care about, what to be cynical about, whom to believe, and what to doubt. This is a far more fraught group of people coming of age post-1960s, at once absorbing the myths of their older siblings and parents yet quickly seeing the shortcomings and delusions of those who came of age just before they did.

Not to get all Raymond Williams here, but generational configurations use each other to formulate self-understandings. Archetypes and structures of feeling from residual cultures become the seeds of emergent cultures, with distorted-mirror continuities as well as ruptures. Or, to put it another way, Gen Xers emulated many aspects of “second-half boomers,” particularly the “fuck it” aspect, while millennials & post-millennials cast “OK boomer” aspersions on the lot of us. How we decide where continuities & ruptures exist in collective tales of generational identities has big stakes: they shape electoral politics, cultural representation, regional/national/transnational definitions, and myriad personal self-understandings.