Friday, June 15, 2012

Form and Content: "Your Silent Face" by New Order

In the article "What Isn't for Sale?" in The Atlantic (which also takes excellent book form as What Money Can't Buy where the argument is expanded further), Michael J Sandel address the increasing encroachment of market values into every aspect of life. While he makes a number of worthwhile points, I was particularly interested in how he framed his longer, second answer to the question, "Why worry that we are moving toward a society in which everything is up for sale?" Sandel wants to make a claim about the "corrosive tendency of markets." In particular, he asserts, "Putting a price on the good things in life can corrupt them. That’s because markets don’t only allocate goods; they express and promote certain attitudes toward the goods being exchanged."

What I find particularly resonant in his response is one of the mistakes he identifies in the thinking of people who tend to ignore this "corrosive tendency" when they urge market solutions for any and all organizational problems. Sandel writes, "Economists often assume that markets are inert, that they do not affect the goods being exchanged. But this is untrue. Markets leave their mark. Sometimes, market values crowd out nonmarket values worth caring about." The underlying assumption governing the thoughts of these economists is essentially that there is no necessary relation between form and content, when it should be clear that the form of our approach to an issue (treating it purely in terms of economics, for instance) inherently affects every part of the process. This is, in a sense, the same thing being expressed by the saying, "When all you have is a hammer, everything starts looking like a nail."

Of course, this particular problem of the separability of form and content is as old the the dichotomy between them itself. In can easily be traced back at least as far as classical Greek philosophy: after all, we don't talk about the transcendent realm of Platonic forms--eidos--as separate from their instantiations in any particular content for nothing. (Of course, the basis for that dichotomy likely greatly predates the Greeks, and probably has a tremendously complicated religious lineage, since it was still essentially religious for them even after they explicitly conceptualized it.)

The general problem with these two concepts seems to me to be that people confuse the fact that we can provisionally distinguish between them with the idea that they are fully separable from each other in any meaningful fashion. Their relation is a good examples of the dialectical movement of concepts, as any rigorous attempt to deal with one leads necessarily to a consideration of the other as well (I have to specify "rigorous" here because, along with Hegel, I do recognize that the majority of the concepts that we employ in ordinary life are abstract and one-sided--see his delightfully playful piece "Who Thinks Abstractly" for an example of this--even though closer attention to even our ordinary reveals their unintended complexity, a fact that drove many a Platonic dialogue as well).


Now, Sandel's particular criticisms and these philosophical issues of form and content are interesting all by themselves, but because everything is better with music here is New Order's "Your Silent Face," which also deals with these themes:




The very first verse captures the inextricable relation between form and content and the futility of any conception of either apart from the other:

"A thought that never changes
Remains a stupid lie
It's never been quite the same
No hearing or breathing
No movement, no colors
Just silence."

A thought that never changes is a stupid lie precisely because it never changes, because if it stays the same it is not truly being thought. Thinking is an act, it is something that we do and is a dynamic process bound up with the rest of our life. That includes our relations with others (who we hear or who are to hear us), our own physical and emotional state (breathing), the effects of time and distance as well as the need for thought to develop or be expressed (movement), and even confront the variety and complexity of the material world (colors).

If the content of a thought stays the same then it does not deserve the status of a thought as such, instead it is a dogma, a fact (and likely quite narrowly conceived),  or something similar. It is stupid because it is not thinking, not using one's own intelligence; it is a lie because it is being untrue to the world and to experience, both of which are far more dynamic than can be captured by a "thought that never changes." Indeed, such an attitude is indicative of a pretty grim way of living, as we see expressed in a line shortly after: "We asked you what you'd seen, / You said you didn't care." Only if you don't really care about the whole, wide, incredible world outside of you could you really embrace such an attitude, and maybe then you would have a "silent face," one unreadable to others, giving and asking nothing.

Indeed, this kind of emptiness is the focus of the second major verse in the song:
"Sound formed in a vacuum
May seem a waste of time
It's always been just the same
No hearing or breathing
No movement no lyrics
Just nothing."
This verse reiterates much of the same perspective as the first, emphasizing that a content (sound) without a form (in a vacuum) is, for all intents and purposes, just nothing. If a thought is not somehow expressed or embodied, i.e., if no one hears it, no one says it, no sound waves move, and no meaning is put across, then it is totally fruitless. Even if it prevents the thought/sound from staying the same, prevents it from staying pure, expression is necessary.

Of course, it might seem hypocritical of me to have spent so much time discussing the meaning of this song in terms of one very particular form of content (the lyrics) without addressing its form, and there is a certain validity to that criticism. However, my point here has not been that we can never differentiate between form and content, only that no final and complete differentiation is possible. The extreme nature of the examples in "Your Silent Face"--a thought that never changes, a sound in a vacuum--suggests that it too is primarily directed at the absolute separation of form and content. But none of that means that we can't devote our time to mostly one or the other, after all, to demand that we always and everywhere deal with both it to fall into another kind of unreasonable demand for absoluteness and completeness.

Yet at the same time, I think it is worthwhile to at least briefly mention the form of this song as it is certainly relevant here. This is because this song could be said to serve as a kind of self-explanation for New Order, particular in terms of their embrace of electronica. Because of the precision of electronic beats and programmed synthesizers parts of New Order's music might seem to be devoted to the ideal of "sameness," and indeed the beginning of the song does feature the repetition of a simple beat and synth line. However, the song is quickly awash in broad sweeps of synth and then harmonica, and then the singing itself, which triggers a subtle change  in the original synth line, and from there the songs begins to develop more and more layers. The "sameness" of electronica makes room for hearing, breathing, movement, and lyrics.

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