How To Do Politics With Art

Violaine Roussel, Anurima Banerji, Violaine Roussel, Anurima Banerji

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317120964
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

A major issue in the relation of art to the rest of society is the question of how art penetrates politics. From the perspective of most art scholars, this is a question of aesthetics—whether politics necessarily pollutes and debases the quality of the arts. From the perspective of social science, it has been primarily a question of meaning—how political messages are conveyed through artistic media.

Recent work has begun to broaden the study of the arts and politics beyond semiosis and content focus. Several strands of scholarship are converging around the general issue of the social relationships within which art takes political form, that is, how art and artists do politics. This perspective of "doing" moves analysis beyond addressing the meaning of culture, to focus on the ways that art is embedded in—and intervenes in—social relationships, activities, and institutions.

This volume brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars from France and the United States to investigate these directions and themes by exploring the question of "how to do politics with art" from a comparative standpoint, putting sociological approaches in conversation with other disciplinary prisms. It will be of interest to scholars of social movements and politicization, the sociology of art, art history, and aesthetics.

1 Composing workers

William G. Roy

In the spring of 1936, the American Music League, affiliated with the American Communist Party, held a music festival in New York City.¹ The party’s newspaper, the Daily World, noted that 1500 people attended two sessions where the Fur Workers Chorus, Freiheit Gezang Ferein, the New Singers, the Daily World Chorus, and African American baritone William Bowers performed. Classical composers Aaron Copland and Norman Cazden, among others, contributed original compositions. According to the Daily World, “The festival was an encouraging triumph for the League, which proposes to inaugurate extensive and far-reaching activities for the future—to defend musical culture against the dangers of fascism, censorship and war, and to develop a healthy musical life in America.”² This event was a single moment during an extraordinary eruption of insurgent cultural creativity across virtually every art medium that gave aesthetic form to one of the most radical movements in American history and had permanent effects on the mainstream parts of those arts (Denning 1996). But the left-wing musical movement, while fostering fundamental dialogue about the role of music in society, failed in its initial strategy of making “good” music for the masses to promoting what they saw as the people’s own music, folk music.

The role of music in the left-wing movements of the 1930s and 1940s raises a fundamental question about the relationship of politics and culture: How do creative specialists—in this case composers of serious or classical music—forge a movement for the benefit of workers, a class whose members typically share neither the knowledge nor taste for what those specialists are skilled at creating? How can creators make politically potent creative products if their medium of expression has no overt political content? These are the animating questions behind this paper. During the 1930s, a broad left-wing movement in the United States included artists, musicians, writers, poets, dramatists, dancers, and other creative specialists who attempted to foster organizations, mobilize their colleagues, invent new forms, and make creations on behalf of broadly defined radicalism. Most of them, especially in the early movement before a shift to folk art in the late 1930s, faced a common structural and cultural challenge. All their training and professional success revolved around an aesthetic standard of quality formed in an aristocratic system that eschewed common taste. Yet their movement was putatively on behalf of the working class, many of whose members were indifferent or even hostile to refined aesthetic standards. For musicians, there was a further challenge that the political commitments that gave content to many artistic media found no direct expression in music, a medium without explicit message. How were they to create political music if music had no message? Of course, songs had lyrics, but many musicians, especially fine musicians, did not write songs.

In 1936, the left-wing Composers’ Collective, an affiliate of the American Music League, initiated a journal, Unison, to mobilize members and share perspectives. A mimeographed mixture of opinion pieces, announcements, news items, reviews, and analysis, it expressed the dilemma of seeking a role for composers in a movement with revolutionary aspirations and pragmatic actions. While in principle they aspired to foment historical transformation, in practice, their activities involved discussions of ideology, workshops on composing, and concerts to bring people together. As revolutionaries, they were more familiar with violins than violence. This paper explores how they sought a political strategy for musicians, specifically how they attempted to reconcile the nature of art as they understood it with the effectiveness of reaching the working class. The inherent tensions between these two dimensions presented the challenge. To put it differently, they were negotiating tensions between two kinds of identity. Their aesthetic identity was based on a commitment to “good” music. From the perspective of aesthetic identity, the title of this paper would be read as composing workers, as in agents dedicated to musical composition. The artists’ political identity was based on a commitment to the movement and its goals. An emphasis on political identity shifts the valence of the paper’s title to composing workers. It was workers that the musicians were composing for. Especially if we stretch the meaning of “composing” to mean putting things in order, the musicians were “composing workers” in a transitive sense.³ My paper will address the process as well as the content of their dialogue over the role that musicians should play in the movement, essentially how musicians do politics, based on the Unison’s discourse and content and the context of the larger movement. Not only can the attempt to strategize be seen in the general discussion, but the journal published interviews with leading composers asking their opinions about the political role of composers, a very fortuitous series used as the major data source for this chapter.

A relational perspective

These questions arise out of and are examined through a relational perspective (Emirbayer 1997, Mische 2011, Tilly 2005, Diani and McAdam 2003) or more particularly what Charles Tilly has called relational realism (Tilly 2002). A relational perspective focuses less on actors and their attributes than on relationships and what happens between actors. Relational characteristics cannot be reduced to individual actors. In tune with a broad range of social scientists, Tilly’s relational realism focuses less on the conventional units of analysis—individuals, groups, organizations, societies, or world systems—than on relations: the clapping of hands rather than the hands themselves (Tilly 2002). Qualities such as equality/inequality, agreement/disagreement, power/subordination, and interaction/isolation cannot be conceptualized or measured on one actor at a time. Economic equality, for example, can be between two rich people or two poor people; political agreement can be between two liberals or two conservatives. Knowing a person’s wealth or political orientation can never tell us whether they are equal to or in agreement with anyone else. But relationships go beyond similar or dissimilar attributes. Relations happen between people largely through interaction. Actors work at relationships, negotiating such relational qualities as trust, reciprocity, cooperation, or conflict. A relational approach to politics focuses on how relational qualities such as solidarity, contest, and consensus are created, sustained, and undermined on one hand and how those relational qualities affect the capacity for collective action. Aesthetic relations refer to ways that shared or differing aesthetic dispositions affect the way that actors relate to one another. Those who care about the arts explicitly and implicitly work to interact on the same aesthetic wave length or to erect aesthetic boundaries between each other.

Identity mechanisms, Tilly wrote, “treat the construction, challenge, defense, and transformation of collective answers to the questions, ‘Who are you?’ ‘Who are we?’ and ‘Who are they?’ as central to a wide range of political contention” (2002, xii–xiii; 2008). For Tilly, identity was a fundamental concept for linking the micro to the macro through what he called “the essential identity chain: transaction, tie, network, category, and group. An identity is simply the social experience of one of these elements coupled with public representation of that experience” (2002, 49). Identity work goes up and down this chain. Recurrent transactions create ties, which are structured into networks, which are reified into categories that gel into groups. Group members in turn sharpen and dampen categories that affect who interacts with whom in networks, reinforcing or loosening ties that actors transact in. Tilly also emphasized that identities are multiple—that each actor has many identities that are involved in a variety of transactions, ties, networks, categories, and groups. And most importantly for the study of contentious politics, some lend themselves to mobilization and collective action and others do not.

A moment’s reflection suggests that this approach to relational realism fits music like a glove. Music happens between people within a relationship among composer, performer, and listener. Music can build boundaries or weaken them, including those that constitute the infrastructure of modern society: class, race, and gender, among other forms of stratification (Roy and Dowd 2010, Pachucki, Pendergrass, and Lamont 2007).

Composers, politics, and the public

The relationship examined here is the one between American left-wing art music composers and their audiences in the 1930s. In the second quarter of the twentieth century, not only was the broad progressive movement highly mobilized around cultural creativity, but the movement also included some of the nation’s most renowned artists, musicians, playwrights, novelists, poets, and choreographers. Aesthetic stars such as Aaron Copland, John Dos Passos, Orson Wells, Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, and Eugene O’Neill were committed (in varying degrees) to infusing politics into their art and their art into politics (Denning 1996, Roy 2010, Hemingway 2002, Lieberman 1995). Robbie Lieberman, in My Song Is My Weapon, vividly describes the richness of the subculture with its doctors, neighborhood, dry cleaners, summer camps, reading clubs, fraternal orders, political activities, choruses, drama clubs, co-ops, Young Pioneers, dance groups and more, concluding that for many, being a part of this community was conformity, not rebellion (1995). Activists, many of them associated with the American Communist Party and affiliated organizations, saw the arts as a way to reach potential constituents and a foretaste of life after the anticipated revolution. Moreover, the depth of the Great Depression convinced many artistic professionals that American society faced a crisis that required radical change. At the same time, Americans participated in amateur production across the aesthetic spectrum, many of them in groups with political affiliations. Further fueled by New Deal subsidies, the combination arguably resulted in a politically infused effervescence of artistic collective action unmatched before or since.

Many of the radical creative specialists sought not only to reshape the content and form of their art but also to redefine the relationship between creators and their audiences. Musicians were especially active and self-conscious in reconsidering the relationship between artist and audience, though they faced a challenge found in virtually all arts, especially in music. Indeed, perhaps in no other art was there such a gulf between the aesthetic judgment of what was considered high-quality creativity and the aesthetic tastes of average Americans. Modern music had turned against tonality and forms that most Americans found pleasing. Twentieth-century “serious music” became dominated by abrasive atonality, irregular jagged rhythms, and abnegation of melody, intentionally affirming sounds that only trained ears and highbrow taste could appreciate. At the same time, it had become organized into institutions that valorized the refined tastes of the elite while invidiously marginalizing that of the masses (DiMaggio 1982a, 1982b; Levine 1988). Politically engaged musicians felt they had to choose between “good” music and pandering to common taste.⁴

At the core of politically engaged musicians in the 1930s was the American Music League (AML), loosely affiliated with the American Communist Party. The party provided meeting space and endorsed AML’s leadership, while remaining indifferent to its activities. Some participants were party members, but most were not. Though primarily a federation of musical organizations, the League’s own unified activities included Unison: Organ of the American Music League, which was published irregularly from 1936 to 1938. While most of the organizations affiliated with the AML were amateur choruses, orchestras, and bands, the Composers’ Collective probably had the broadest impact. Founded as what would now be called a consciousness-raising group, composers discussed political issues and the role that composers could play in the movement. Considerable time was spent providing mutual feedback on works-in-progress, addressing both the aesthetic and political dimensions of the art. Especially significant about these composers was their deep reflection on the relationships that constituted “ musicking,” especially the relationships among composers, performers, and audience.⁵

As these composers articulated these relationships, the salient dimensions were aesthetic and political, leading them to problematize their aesthetic and political identities. The aesthetic challenge was how to ensure the quality of music when engaging a constituency that many considered inferior in terms of aesthetic preference and taste. Initially, they took for granted the necessity of “good”—that is, serious or classical—music and were frequently flummoxed at how to reach untutored audiences and amateur performers. We might characterize this challenge as how to achieve aesthetic consonance, analogous to the need for frame alignment in political mobilization.

The literature on social movement framing has focused on the extent to which activists and potential constituents align on ideological and logical grounds.⁶ According to frame theory, social movements are more likely to mobilize potential constituents when an organization’s cognitive frames align with those of the target constituents’ (Snow et al. 1986). When movements use culture to mobilize potential constituents, aesthetic consonance must be established. The cultural forms that mediate between activists (including creative specialists) and potential constituents must be aesthetically pleasing to both sides. For music, this includes genres and categories such as serious music, jazz, popular music, or folk music, standards of what “good” music is, shared understanding of when and where music is played or performed, and shared tastes for harmonies, melodies, instrumentation, rhythms, and timbres. In relational terms, aesthetics can be a bridge to bring individuals and groups together or a boundary to push them apart. And the work of bringing people together or building boundaries to keep them apart can take aesthetic form. For Pierre Bourdieu, aesthetic dispositions manifested as taste situate individuals in the status hierarchy of society, though he feels that the deep imprinting of habitus limits the ability of individuals to improve or change their status (Bourdieu 1984). Sometimes the aesthetic dimension of relational work and the relational dimension of aesthetic work are implicit and unconscious, but occasionally the connection is intentional, as we see in the case of the composers studied here. While there were frequent suggestions for composers to meet audiences and amateur performers halfway, there was greater emphasis on educating the untutored, preserving the artists’ role as aesthetic judges.

The political puzzle was the extent to which “political” meant overt political content that would heighten political understanding or simply mobilizing political organizations through musicking. As a vanguard organization, the Communist Party’s model of working toward the revolution was raising political consciousness through propaganda, which for music meant infusing music with political content, captured in the phrase, “My Song Is My Weapon” (Lieberman 1995). But music as such has no verbal content. It can of course, be accompanied by lyrics, but the effect of the music and the effect of the lyrics can be mutually reinforcing, contradictory, or unrelated depending on the content of each, the context of production or reception, and the interpretation of listeners. And for many composers, when music did have verbal content in songs and opera, the heavy-handed propaganda common in Communist Party politics offended their aesthetic sensibilities. Thus many of the composers were more oriented toward infusing music into politically overt organizations, some of which were manifestly musical organizations, especially leftist choruses and bands. They also aspired to bring good music to unions, peace organizations, and other organizations in the broad progressive movement.

Three phases of aesthetic relations in American left-wing music

The period focused on here is the middle of three phases that the “Old Left” or Communist Party–centered musical project passed through. The first two coincided with periods of the Communist international (Comintern) movement; the third was more specific to the American movement and thus more loosely connected to the political party. The Communist Party became active in the early 1920s, led by stalwarts who hewed close to the party line. In the late 1920s, when the party moved into the “Third Period” proclaimed by the Soviet...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Composing workers
• 2 “Singing for a cause”: music and political mobilizations in contemporary France
• 3 How activist plays do politics
• 4 Nrityagram: tradition and the aesthetics of transgression
• 5 “Social cinema” and “civic debates”: the politicization of films through festivals in France
• 6 Movie-star politics on and off the screen: Harry Belafonte, Jane Fonda, and Warren Beatty
• 7 How Hollywood agents do politics
• Afterword: On ways of viewing: notes on the making of Kamakha: Through Prayerful Eyes
• Index