Value Competition

Loving, Hating, and Forgiving One's Culture

Just finished Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story, D.T. Max's nicely done biography of David Foster Wallace, this morning; went yesterday afternoon with Darcy to see Vita and Virginia...the confluence provokes a multiple choice question--

One should feel: a) rejoicing at our culture for providing a place in which the genius of Wallace and the greater genius of Woolf could flourish; b) anger at our culture for using the mental illness of W. and W. along with their exceptionally fine minds as raw material to benefit the rest of us while killing them...they would have been crazy people as English peasants or lords a thousand years ago, but would not have killed themselves, one suspects; c) forgiveness of our culture and of ourselves as the constituents of that culture; d) all of the above; or e) none of the above.

I choose d).  

Some promos for life in the South Orange-Maplewood-Orange-West Orange neck of NJ suburbia/urbia: I bought the bio on Saturday at Words bookstore in Maplewood.  Max did a reading there Saturday night, which was followed by a reception at the home of GlobalSOMA colleague and author Marina Budhos, who was at Yaddo with Wallace in 1989.  Darcy and I saw the play at Luna Stage, one of the showpieces in the Orange-West Orange  Valley arts district just to the north of where we live and to the south of our church; our minister is one of the ValleyArts board members.

 

 

J.K. for PM? AKA Rowling and Franzen: English Strivers and American Aristocrats

Just started reading J.K. Rowling's new adult novel, The Casual Vacancy...very positive take from the first hundred pages or so...acknowledge that I'm likely affected by being a local politician in my spare time...feel a sense of appreciation/gratitude that she's writing about local politics...thank you very much, J.K.

Just had a thought about TCV in comparison to Franzen's Freedom, which I enjoyed greatly when I read it hot off the presses several years ago and which has now faded into the pleasant vagueness that novels inhabit for me once I've lost a memory for the plot details. Walter, Patty, and Richard in Freedom all had things to do and places to go I'm sure, vague as the specifics have become for me, but they also embodied soaring aspirations for something grand; though none of them IIRC came from posh backgrounds, they are all aristocrats of a kind--Patty could be an heiress, Richard a Tolstoyan landowner, Walter a scion of a line of manufacturing lords.   J.K.'s large cast of English characters, on the other hand, seem to embody a much humbler set of aspirations.

I suppose that in literature I prefer aristocrats to the rest of us; though my mind is open, I suspect that TCV will not reach me as Freedom did.   On the other hand, I do not think Franzen could be anybody I would vote for as a politician in a local election or any other kind of election.  Rowling, though, seems like someone I as a Briton might be very happy to vote for as a candidate for local council, a seat in Parliament, or as leader of my parliamentary party.  

Art Critics as a Model for Business Columnists and Business Academics

Those of us who express opinions on business matters as journalists or as professors in business schools are subject to criticism from two sides.  From one side, there is concern that our work can support populist misunderstanding and dislike of business and markets.  From another side, there is concern that our work amounts to an apologetic for business and business interests, whether or not those interests harmonize with those of society.

As a professor at Rutgers Business School who teaches business ethics and business law in a department that deals with supply chain management--including outsourcing and off-shoring decisions--and marketing, I have grappled over the years with the criticism from both sides.  The best way to respond to it, I've come to believe, is to see what I do when I express opinions on business matters as similar to what critics do in reviewing painting, books, theater, dance, and other art forms.

An art critic needs a willingness to tell it like it is in identifying work that in the critic's judgment is not good.  If Times arts section readers knew that Michiko Kakutani were an uncritical cheerleader who praised every book she reviewed--instead of the occasionally acerbic reviewer that she actually is--she would be a poor critic indeed.

So, too, we in business schools and the business media need to be able to criticize given instances of business conduct that we regard as foolish, immoral, or otherwise inadvisable.  if we do not do that, and only express support for business across the board, we are doing our jobs poorly, and are subject to valid criticism as mere cheerleaders for business and its interests.

Now, the other side of the coin.  Along with a willingness to stand up for standards, an art critic needs to have a deep appreciation of the form he or she is reviewing.  A reviewer of contemporary painting who expressed the view that modern art from the time of Picasso and Cubism in the early twentieth century to the present day has been a disaster would not be an effective critic for the Times or any other paper.  To be useful to gallery-goers, art buyers, and others, the critic should not be estranged from the art form he or she is criticizing.

The same applies to those of us who express opinions on business as journalists and academics.  For our opinions to matter to businesspeople, we need to have a fundamental appreciation of business and markets, much as we may strongly oppose a given instance of business conduct or practice.  If that makes us apologists, so be it. 

I strongly believe that there is a role in society for criticism from the outside that does not register in the art world or in the business world.  The classicist art critic who contends that modern art has been an aesthetic debacle and the Thoreauvian social critic of business and markets are both figures who should be present in the broader culture.

At the same time, the role of the outsider critic is not mine as a business school professor, nor in my judgment should it be.  As a professor of business law and business ethics who discusses business scandals and failures as well as business successes in my classes and with journalists, I am equivalent to a reviewer for the daily arts section rather than to a sweeping social critic.  Whatever I may do on my own time, I do my job best by being like Michiko Kakutani, not by aspiring to the mantle of Henry David Thoreau. 

Holiday Reading--Paul Auster

Okay, I'm not going to argue with James Woods' takedown that I read somewhere (TNR, I think) a few weeks back--yes, Paul Auster is Conan Doyle for hipsters, not Samuel Beckett.   But as one who likes Conan Doyle a lot (and J.R.R. Tolkien a lot more than a lot) and has doubts about Beckett and a number of the leading twentieth century modernists in literature and some other genres, I'm fine with that.  Invisible had the usual Austerian spooky thinness, along with a very nice moral puzzle that made me suspect Auster's been reading Jonathan Haidt on disgust.

The basics of the plot: Decades ago, in 1967, the narrator, a Columbia grad student, had a passionate summer of love with...his sister.  As in Haidt's scenario, there's no apparent harm to anyone and no pangs of guilt...and yet as the reader one has certain complex feelings of repulsion relating to the brother-sister sex...or perhaps one takes it in stride as nothing much or even as kind of hot, enlightened modern liberal that one is.  But Auster lays a trap for his readers that is very nice and that lifts up his plot from being a simple puzzle that is a mere gloss on Haidt and makes it into a tricky puzzle that happens to work as an invisible, imaginary criticism of Haidt's position that conservatives experience disgust more powerfully than liberals.

The incestuous narrator, who is shown as feeling nothing much at least on the surface about his own sister-loving, is consumed by vindictive rage over the actions of a mysterious French intelligence agent/poli sci prof.  In the same fateful 1967, the professor stabbed a young black man in upper Manhattan who brandished a gun and demanded the narrator's and the prof's money.  The youth was fatally wounded but not close to dying; knowing that, the professor dragged him into Riverside Park and stabbed him repeatedly to kill him and keep his mouth shut.  Lacking legal recourse against the professor (the narrator has fled after the initial stabbing and did not see the professor's later actions) and eaten up by a desire to ruin him, the narrator travels to Paris, charms the daughter of the woman the professor plans to marry, and tells her what he knows.

What the narrator is experiencing, I would suggest, is disgust that--like disgust at incest--cannot be adequately rationalized in terms of principles of harm or fairness.  The professor's initial defensive reaction, though extreme, is defensible; his later repeated stabbing does no additional harm, since the robber will die anyway--if anything it lessens the agony the youth would experience from a prolonged death.  And yet by certain lights--more I suspect by the lights of a modern liberal such as the narrator who takes incest in stride than by the lights of a traditionalist conservative who would be repelled by incest--the professor's repeated stabbing of the youth's dying body is disgusting and worthy of retribution.

Creativity in Art, Technology, and Business

Jan Lourie, an artist who combines computer-rearranged, fractalized photos with other images into "metaprints" that sometimes resemble cubist renditions of buildings and sometimes work from other traditions, (in one print that I particularly liked, a Chinese water painting), gave a talk yesterday at Dana Library on creativity.  My RBS colleague Lee Papayanopoulos moderated, and recruited me and my colleagues Faroborz Damanpour and Farrokh Langdana to comment. 

 http://lp.rutgers.edu/metaprints

She focused on a 1937 conference featuring the French mathematicians Henri Poincare and Jacques Hadamard, in which they speculated on a subconscious process by which creativity arises to the surface, juxtaposing that conference with 1930s Freudians, a Herbert Simon paper, John Searle-like questions on whether creativity is involved in certain situations (for example, if someone finds a randomly-generated series of notes that corresponds to a work by Bach and recognizes it as excellent), and questions about the nature of the creativity involved in a business discovery like just-in-time inventory (could it involve an analogy to a surgeon's just-in-time team?). 

Lots of interesting things were said by all; invoking poster's prerogatives, I focus on my own reactions.  Since Jan's presentation fit very well into value competition themes, I was very happy to riff on how one could try to analyze the subconscious creative process alluded to by Hadamard and Poincare in terms of calculative and cultural centers of reason.   I claimed that that combination could be used to analyze what was going on in the J-I-T case (analogical, pattern-oriented reasoning plus calculation) and in Jan's own art (quasi-algorithmic logic ciombined with an overall pattern sense); I closed with an effort to draw in self-other themes a la Freud and their connection to creation.  (The thought I had in mind but didn't express involved the degree to which effective as opposed to ineffective creativity, for all of its association with individuality bursting free from social constraint, also involves a close alignment with certain social norms.)

My day-after question for myself: My remarks implicitly assumed that the same calc-culture, self-other framework that can be used to analyze optimal incentives in business and politics can also be used to analyze optimal incentives in art (and also, though I wasn't making that point, in science and technology).  I think that's true, but I also think that a lit crit analysis of how lit works or a physics analysis of how atoms work will wind up being quite different from a management analysis of how firms work.  The production of truth and beauty may well prove to be quite comparable to the production of the good, but there will also be more than a few differences that any decent future theory will have to have some good takes on.

 

John Updike

Literature is a land of value contradiction, not value competition.  But Updike was tacit value competition, with the calculative craft of his beautiful sentences and the cultural ends of his art pushing one another forward in a cycle of productivity that climbed the alpine heights as few have ever done for so long and so well.  Because Updike was a sensible man who was not contradiction-haunted, he can be judged lacking compared to other artists thus haunted.  But I disagree; Freud remains the exemplary psychologist of the twentieth century, notwithstanding his out-of-place espousal of value contradiction in a domain that has turned to the practical, ameliorative spirit of value competition, and John Updike strikes me as the exemplary American writer of the twentieth century notwithstanding his sunny, sexy, satisfiedly suburban soul.

The Anxiety of Influence

In a 1973 work of criticism that owes a great deal to Nietzsche but that lacks Nietzsche's ability to fuse literary creativity with a scientific spirit--he has Nietzsche's passion and his flair for vatic utterances but not his logical clarity--Harold Bloom maintains that strong poets are formed through an agonistic, Oedipal grappling with their strong predecessors.  

http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/11/01/specials/bloom-influence.html

Bloom can be recast in rational choice terms: Poetry of the highest quality, like mathematics of the highest quality, demands familiarity with other work of the highest quality as a precondition to the advance of the discipline.  The lack of readily verifiable standards of quality and progress in poetry as opposed to mathematics leads to a personal engagement with past masters in the former discipline as opposed to the latter.

The RC recasting of Bloom, plausible as it is, leeches the lifeblood out of his portrait of the strong poet wilfully misreading his predecessors.  A value competition recasting, though not immune itself from the pale sickliness of utilitarian reason, is closer to the original: The strong poet is one in whom reverence for the tradition and iconoclasm are at war within the poet in an intense, fruitful way that for at least a moment, a moment that will soon enough be lost, lifts the poet's powers to the heights at which the great poets of the tradition dwelled in their moment. 

Hidden Pastiche

"S & M: Shrines and Masquerades in Cosmopolitan Times," showing at NYU's 80 Washington Square East Galleries, features videos, fabric art, photographs, sculpture, installations, and paintings by African artists:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/03/arts/design/03chan.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&pagewanted=all

There was no explanatory material on the walls, and I did not see a written gallery guide.  Possibly for that reason, I found myself responding more to text-laden work by Kwame Akoto (portraits with scriptural passages and other writing) and Layton Ynobe Lewis (a disturbing meditation about gay sex and separation from oneself) than to the other art.  I suspect that if the exhibit had had the standard art-speak on the walls or in a booklet, I might well have found the Lewis and Akoto works overly wordy and insufficiently realized as integrated works of art.  That is, I often, even typically, experience museum art as a pastiche with text.  Deprived of that text, I find works that I would see as less than compelling pastiches of clashing approaches (values, we shall say) to be a satisfying fusion of opposing elements/values.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Junot Diaz's novel http://www.junotdiaz.com/ didn't work for me most of the way through, and then did.  I didn't find the narrator's incessant n-word references to Dominicans--perhaps another post on that theme--or his gangsta, babe-magnet persona persuasive, and the equally incessant Tolkien and other fantasy/sci fi references and analogies--Trujillo as Sauron, etc.-- seemed peripheral, distracting, and/or politically confused for a few hundred pages.  The story coalesced for me with the return of Oscar, the love-obsessed, fantasy/sci-fi-obsessed New Jersey Dominican-born hero, to the DR to meet his doom.  A semi-VC line on why: In New Jersey, the heroic quest of Frodo Baggins and the chivalry of Sir Galahad, and the aspirations of Oscar Wao to follow in their footsteps, are casualties of modernity and its rational culture of efficiency and democracy.  In the more traditional culture of the DR, on the other hand, Oscar in his fatal quest for the love of a prostitute with a vicious police officer boyfriend is more akin to Frodo and Sir Gawain.  Diaz does not make the lot of immigrants from the DR in New Jersey, or the possibility of the DR's becoming a modern, highly productive state like Japan, Norway, or New Jersey, nearly as sad as Tolkien made the passing of the age of the elves and Sauron--hurrah for that possibility, I should say, and I suspect Diaz might agree--but he did in the end make me believe emotionally in the analogy between beauty and brutality intertwined in a traditionalist, fatalist DR and evil and virtue bound together by rings and deeper forces of fate in Middle Earth before the Age of Man. 

Beauty

A weekend and a Monday of arts in NYC, with Dostoevsky's "The Grand Inquisitor" directed by Peter Brook:

http://www.nytw.org/tgi_info.asp

and Harry Potter/Daniel Radcliffe along with Vernon Dursley/Richard Griffiths in Peter Shaffer's "Equus":

http://www.equusonbroadway.com/

and Joan Miro at MOMA:

http://www.moma.org/exhibitions/exhibitions.php?id=3993

It all led me to think about the application of a value competition approach to aesthetics.  One line: VC is about what's good or what works, not what's beautiful (or what's true).   The opposite line: VC deals with motivating competing agents to come up with beautiful (or true) work, not just socially beneficial work. 

I think the second line is right; that is, I think VC rightly understood can contribute to understanding the social circumstances under which successful art is produced and how successful art manages competing values and preferences.  But to do a good job rather than a risible one using VC, one should know quite a lot about the field one is commenting on...with that chastening point in mind, a brief application of VC to the three shows:

Dostoevsky in "The Brothers K" and Peter Shaffer in "Equus" strike me as successful in avoiding an art-damaging commitment to either an elite disdain of popular taste or to a popular disdain of elite taste.  By contrast, Miro's work in his 1927-1937 "assassinate figuration" period strikes me as instantiating elite disdain of popular taste, and consequently as lacking a protection against collapse of quality, despite Miro's own great gifts and ability to do strikingly novel work.