The Story of Jane and Lewis

Here's Jane Jacobs on "The Logic of Adding New Work to Old" as part of "import replacement" in city economies:

<blockquote>What kind of logic is this? It is analogous, I think, to a form of logic, or intuition if you prefer, that artists use. Artists often comment that although they are masters of the work they are creating, they also are alert to messages that come from the work, and act upon them. Perhaps a similar rapport is necessary in the mundane process of adding new work to old. At any rate, messages—that is, suggestions—afforded by the parent work seem to be vital to the process.

(<i>The Economy of Cities</i>, Ch. 2—How New Work Begins)</blockquote>

Whatever credibility Jacobs does or does not have in orthodox economic circles, there are very few purely rhetorical lapses in her her oeuvre. That makes this one all the more revealing. Her concrete historical examples of proprietors and organizations "adding new work to old" involve degrees of change which are not quite analogous to reworking a symphonic sketch into a string quartet. They are more like a session drummer who builds a home studio for remote recording work and ultimately gives up playing the drums to be a full-time engineer, producer, executive or agent. I sense that Jacobs is onto something with her theory of city import replacement, but also that events could never have unfolded as she says they did if light industry and the skilled trades were half as much like the arts as her provisional analogy would make them.

Perhaps most workers are indeed more like the drummer-turned-producer than the composer-turned-composer. Yet not all workers are like this. The very notion of "adding new work to old" is anathema to care workers, educators, clergy. This notion doesn't quite fit the regalian functions of government either, and when it does this portends corruption rather than economic prosperity. Even science, to which Jacobs frequently appeals for analogy, is not actually such a perfect analogy to the fabricator who has "broken away" from a parent firm, to the itinerant skilled tradesperson, or to rogue shuttle buses taking up the slack of broken transit systems. Even polymath scientists cannot possibly be equipped to act on every message they receive from their work, and their ability to respond cannot possibly be in perfect alignment with the relative moral (or for that matter the commercial) urgency of many different kinds of feedback. The nexus of market pressure and scientific research is actually fraught with moral and ethical boobytraps (and some devastating mutual failures). Among intellectuals at least, the post-industrial coziness of science and commerce is more often spoken of a crisis than an engine of progress. Jacobs could not have forseen in 1969 the sheer scale of moral failure for which two of her pet examples, 3M and Thiokol, were destined; but she could have asked, as her archfoe Lewis Mumford did incessantly and at length, what sorts of social inputs and outputs are involved when people don't care what they do for work as long as they are working.

To the extent that workers' relationship to their work inheres partly or wholly in non-economic considerations, analogies to "Economic Life" will be of limited validity. It seems to me that (1) moral imperative, and (2) particularistic attachments, are two useful, broad categories of non-economic motivations; one inner and one outer compulsion respectively; perhaps not the only two, but the two most common and powerful ones. Usually such motivations are something less than strictly rational, depending on myriad other considerations which need not detain us for now. They also tend to be absolute: moral bedrock is impenetrable, and blood is thicker than water. Jacobs' artistlike economoids, meanwhile, are neither moral nor particularistic; or if they are these things (and this is the really important point), <i>this is not manifested in their attitudes toward work.</i> If they are particularlistically attached, it is not to their customers or suppliers. And if they are moral beings, their morality does not extend to the plight of customers or suppliers left in the lurch by their sudden change of business.

In college I had a too-short friendship with a supremely talented, intelligent, grounded, and mostly like-minded trombone player. I realized we were less like-minded than I thought when he told me that he didn't care what he ended up doing as long as he was playing the trombone. My friend was at peace with the possibility of playing trombone in a bear suit; Jacobs would have him at peace giving up the trombone if the bear gig paid more. If you want to hear true stories which put this hypothetical one to shame, drop in on a bull session with veteran Los Angeles musicians. That aside, I want to argue that the dilemma of the bear suit illustrates precisely what it is about artists that makes Jacobs' analogy specious. Even in LA.

This essay has already become intensely speculative. Perhaps reality is never quite as cut and dried as the distinctions I have drawn here. I do not seek to conceal this, just to argue that there is an irreconcilable difference between Economic Man and The Artist, no matter what partial reconciliations they may have reached throughout history.







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It was once relayed to me that things were touchy between two musicians I often work with because one had "questioned the integrity" of the other. Evidently the "questioning" was conducted almost exclusively in shouted obscenities. Perhaps I only hear stories of failure in this department because failures make for better stories than successes. As it is, my feeling is that such conversations are seldom conducted respectfully, they are often launched unjustifiably, and they just as often are not launched when they really should be. They are almost always retrospective, because raising this issue proactively is typically taken as an insult and/or a leading indicator of unfitness for the snakepit. The question arises, then, just how much economism, how much moralism, how much particularism is good for people and for their communities? Where does "adding new work to old" end and "selling out" begin?

If a clear answer was possible, there would be fewer blogs on the internet and less shouting in green rooms. My feeling is that all of these qualities are compound, second- and third-order behavioral phenomenon built up out of bedrock, first-order traits. Little to none of this is truly <i>essential</i> or <i>hard-wired,</i> but pragmatically it might as well be. There's no reason to think it is either possible or desirable to curtail human diversity to the point where everyone falls within a predetermined normal range on these measures. That is actually a dystopian nightmare, as Mumford spoke to eloquently and in terms which are refreshingly forthright in comparison to the toxicity of later diversity wars. Here he is considering a conference report on genetic selection:

<blockquote>One would hardly have guessed from such a discussion that thousands of the wisest minds have meditated for thousands of years over what are the most desirable characteristics in human beings, what traits should be modified or repressed, what composite character—or indeed what assortment of characters—is desirable to produce the highest order of human being.

One culture after another has framed its own answer to this problem, by bringing forth ideal types and incarnating them in an endless succession of models in their gods, heroes, saints, sages. ...But one and all these ideal forms have fallen short, even when in individual personalities they seem as close as were Socrates or Francis of Assisi, to achieving perfection within their own chosen framework. In one of the most highly developed cultures on record, the Hellenic, no consensus was ever reached.

What this means, I conclude, is that the only effective approach to this problem is that long ago taken by Nature: to provide the possibility of an endless variety of biological and cultural types, since no single one, however rich and rewarding, is capable of encompassing all the latent potentialities of man. No one culture, no one race, no one period can do more than produce fresh variations on this inexhaustible theme.

(Ch. 10-5)</blockquote>

(I do apologize for the fact that it is seldom possible to excerpt Mumford by the sentence rather than by the page.)

Above I have tried to hone in on an irreconcilable difference between art and commerce. While both callings permit a fair degree of "fresh variation," they do not permit nearly enough to justify statements like, "You can achieve whatever you put your mind to." Usually that statement is directed to questions of aptitude and inclination. Once again, moral imperative and particularistic attachment have either been assumed or assumed irrelevant. My purpose here is to back up a step (or several) and give them their due consideration. I doing so, I wish to take diversity per se as both an immutable condition and an absolute value, but without placing any specific combination of traits beyond reproach. 








To the extent I know them at all, I believe both of these gentleman to be adequately moral people. 




More often, the accused are simply economoids at heart and don't demonstrate the same penchant for moral imperative and particularistic attachment as the accusers do; or perhaps they demonstrate these things elsewhere but not in their capacity as career musicians. Such accusations are often leveled too heedlessly. Just as often they are not leveled when they should be, or not loudly enough. 













































Richard Sennett writes of 3 of 5 young people who choose careers (and ultimately stick to them) that they "want to be sure of what they are doing in advance of doing it." He points to the defensive, controlling impulses underlying this. Obviously there is a balance to be struck here. What exactly is it that these young people want to be "sure" about? Sennett pursues the social-psychological angle. Nowadays, at least, it seems often enough to be nothing more than financial security that such young people want to assure. This is demonstrable, perhaps endemic, perhaps therefore alarming; but it too is just a distraction from the etiological question, which is the more important question. Career choice can be <i>morally</i> driven too, and much speculative ink has also been spilled chronicling adolescent moral absolutism. Of course this moral orientation guarantees nothing special in and of itself, even compared to the justly-maligned financial motive. Moral compasses can be broken or defective. My point is that morality and pragmatism are different species of motivation with different implications for the emerging young. Per any given orientation, some careers hit the bullseye, others can be excluded out of hand, and the remaining grey areas may have to be considered more in depth in order to make a determination. (This is the rational side. Ostensibly there is an affective side as well which, incidentally, may also be essentially non-moral.) A moral orientation is bound to map this territory differently than one where money, adventure, or tribe, e.g., have surpassed it in importance.

Of course it is possible to understand all of these things as morally oriented, or at least morally flavored. And this does happen: "Greed is good." "Family comes first." This is oblique to my purpose here. The reason I have compartmentalized morality is that I think Jacobs has also compartmentalized it, and that this is informative.

Artisthood has been called a protacted adolescence, and adolescence has been called a protracted financial dependence on parents. Hence it seems reasonable that the study of adolescence is relevant to understanding artists' place (or, in the case of Jabobs's theory, the lack of one) in economic life. To the extent that city economies are driven by "adding new work to old," the capacity of artists to contribute is very limited. Economic Man quits playing the drums to produce records. An artist, meanwhile, won't even make a piano reduction of a symphony without a really good reason. Most likely that reason needs to be a moral one; at the very least it needs to comport with their morality. Economic Man is probably a moral being too, but <i>not</i> in the very particular (and, for Jacobs, essential) case of "adding new work to old." Whatever morality Economic Man does possess is compartmentalized. <i>If it were not, new work would hardly ever be added to old.</i> For economists, this latter condition is called "backwardness," no matter its etiology. For artists it is called Thursday. I think this neatly encapsulates our collective economic predicament, not just as it relates to careers or to cities or to morality or to artists, but in the broadest sense.

People make fun of artists for their moralism because the objects of this moralism, especially when they are things like symphonies and string quartets, seem not actually to carry any moral weight whatsoever. The writhing effort to impart just such moral weight to artworks is the closest thing we have to a master narrative of the last 70 years. But this merely passes the buck from the moral question to a practical one, temporarily easing some inner tension but really resolving nothing. To close the moral circle, activist artists assume ultimate purposes which may be at odds with the work they were already doing. Ultimacy of purpose is strictly determinative of means, but they have already chosen the means before they have chosen the purpose. This is not activism. Activism is at odds with art for the same reasons Jacobs' "Economic Life" is at odds with art. Activists are constantly "adding new work to old." Activists are nothing if not "alert to messages that come from the work" and are always prepared for midstream changes of course. Among those who are not already artists, how many receive messages from their work to the effect of, "Make an artwork about this?" It must happen from time to time, but I think that people who are already artists tend to grossly overestimate here. They are artists at heart and too deeply affected by their art to see this question clearly.

At a time when no one can agree on anything anymore, everyone seems to agree that a moral commitment to a string quartet is irrational. This conclusion seems unavoidable. I certainly cannot resolve it. The best I can do is to reiterate that we don't actually know what the world would look like if this irrational moral attachment were to disppear from human activity. My sense is that it is part of the ecosystem and that the whole ecosystem depends on it. This inference cannot be rationally defended, tested or proven. We might nonetheless do well to consider the broader thrust of Mumford's work here. He documented admirably and intricately the disappearance of this moral element from economic life and the devastating failures this has caused and is still causing. The profound antipathy of his work to Jacobs' work is actually far more total than their petty squabbles and petty commonalities would indicate. 
















Most light industry and handicraft also seem not to carry such weight, and we can all be thankful that workers in these areas know so. Everyone, especially artists, owes prosperity to them and their non-moral stance on the type of work they do.

This being as it is, I still think that the internal dynamics of artmaking, their psycho-economic transactions if you will, usually either require or lead inexorablty towards a moral rather than a market orientation. I suspect that even the archetypal mercenary commercial artist is someone who has previously passed through a period of morally-oriented artmaking; this commerial artist has merely developed from an adolescent into an adult. Meanwhile, there is a sub-caste of morally-oriented <i>ur</i>-artists displaying adolescent qualities. Foremost among these qualities is that their morality is not compartmentalized from their work. When Economic Men tell us to "get over ourselves," what they are saying is, "Comparmentalize your morality from your career." I am not sure there is a conclusive rational rebuttal to this. I do think that Economic Man cannot be quite so sure in predicting what would happen to art under his own non-moral regime, nor that he would necessarily find it to be an improvement, though its possible that he would. I also think that he need look no further than the 3M and Thiokol examples for hints that his grand comparmentalization is not sustainable. But artists may ultimately not have much to teach him. If you believe the headlines, the moral orientation of artists does not in fact render them ecnomically negligible. Evidently they can still contribute obliquely to economic growth, because moneyed milennials like living near artists, because artists cover the swing shift in mixed-use disticts, because music makes kids smart, etc.



Sennett: "This is the paradox of adolescence and its terrible unease. So much is possible, yet nothing is happening..." (19) So much is possible indeed, but not just anything and everything. Unlike Economic Man, we are not simply happy as long as <i>something</i> is happening. Even my college friend, for whom this was far more negotiable than it was for me, imposed a limit on this negotiability (the trombone) which in a strictly economic sense is absurdly narrow. As different from him as I suddenly felt myself to be, we had far more in common with each other than either of us did with businesspeople.



Sennett pp. 23-24--on the failure to overcome adolescent absolutism
What is this passage but a more sober, learned version of the plebeian admonition to artsy-fartsies to "get over yourselves?" When I write of the "paricularistic attachments" and "moral imperatives" of the artist, I have trapped myself into implying that these things are fixed and that I support their fixedness. Sennett is absolutely correct, I think, to hold that perfect rigidity here is always unhealthy and usually dangerous. Many artists I have known indeed compartmentalize their openness to experience exactly the same way that entrepreneurs and apparatchiks are known to compartmentalize their morality. This is unfortunate in any number of quotidian senses. But this is also where the bedrock moral arbitrariness of (some) artworks undermines the attack on artists. Just as this arbitrariness precluded a rational defense, so it precludes a rational attack. Just as the activist artist seeks to resolve this arbitrariness through activism, the <i>ur</i>-skeptic avoids thorny questions of intrinsic value and appeals to broad, functional indications which inject an air of objectivity: free markets won't sustain such art; artists should write for an audience, not for themselves or for other artists; art was better when the artists were literally servants; jazz records were better before the advent of the LP turned them all into jam sessions. The triteness of such thinking, even within fairly insular groups of artists, conceals just how radical it actually is vis-a-vis artistic creativity. In three of these anecdotes, the artist reacts in Skinnerian fashion to some stimulus, just as Economic is thought to react to market forces. In the rhetorical construction of the "audience" (the construction for which Gann was willing to publicly reproach even his fellow traveler Tenney), there is a quite curious marriage of assumptions: certainty as to what the audience wants, combined with a profound anti-particularism as to which individuals might comprise it in any given instance. I think that these two assumptions are very amenable to rational debate and testing.






















Jacobs again:

<blockquote>At first thought, it is difficult to understand how intelligent and humane people can devote themselves, as many do nowadays, to creating not only missiles and bombers, but gases and poisons... Certainly neither patriotic fervor nor bellicosity seems to have much to do with people's participation in such evil. They are not necessarily proud of their work, as patriots would be. Indeed, they tend to hide their revolting occupations, as executioners do. Or when, like the inventor of Napalm, they are identified and put on the defensive, they like to protest that they have only been contributing to knowledge, possibly useful knowledge; and, far from indicating a fever for war, they are apt to disassociate themselves and their work from it. They say the uses to which their work is put are not their responsibility. I suspect that the sheer purposefulness and interest of the work, as a quality apart from its uses, exerts an immense attraction. ... It is hard to work without purposefulness. It is agonizing to be capable of solving problems and have no opportunities to do so. It may be that many people prefer involvement in bad purposes and wicked creations to aimlessness and boredom in their occupation. The impulse to work where "you can find it easy to make things happen," especially new and difficult things, is certainly not unhealthy."

The Economy of Cities
Ch. 7—Capital for City Economic Development</blockquote>

This could almost be Mumford on antidepressants. But Mumford (and I) could not just breeze past the phrase "as a quality apart from its uses." In Jacobs' account, this compartmentalization arises only in the rhetorical extreme of weapon production. In reality, it infects all corners of "economic life" to varying degrees. "Economic life," as opposed to agrarian life or life on the dole, is definitionally intolerant of qualilty-use unity. Such unity is nowadays merely another privilege enjoyed by a tiny minority of a minority, Knowledge Workers. It is the privilege of prosperity with a clean conscious.

A co-worker of mine (one who votes for democrats) is known to defend his profligate use of paper plates by pointing out that it keeps the plate manufacturer in business. I jabbed back that he is lucky not to live next to or downwind of the paper factory. Then we went out and played a set and forgot, always temporarily, that we enjoy talking but can't agree on much of anything.























A working theory: Gann's desire for "wide appeal" arises from a moral imperative, but it is also profoundly anti-particularistic. Ditto for writing under the rubric that only future generations will appreciate you. The complete lack of any existing particularistic attachments vis a vis writing music seems hard to believe; and in any case, newly arising ones would force exponents of both these orientations to rereckon. Who has already reckoned? Schoenberg's private concert society and Babbitt's specialist composer.

Otherwise an exceptionally learned man, Gann suddenly becomes a dime store essentialist vis a vis The Audience. 











Jane and Lewis make a lovely intellectual odd couple. They concur much more often than their infamous foofaraw would indicate, and they compensate for each other's blind spots almost perfectly.














=======================
Jane Jacobs
<i>The Question of Separatism</i>
Ch. 5—Paradoxes of Size

"the English biologist J.B.S. Haldane wrote a delightful short essay called "On Being the Right Size." He pointed out, among other things, that sheer size has much to do with the equipment an animal must have. ... [He] presents us with an interesting principle...: big animals are not big because they are complicated; rather, they have to be complicated because they are big. This principle, it seems to me, also applies to institutions, governments, companies, organizations of all sorts. The larger they are, the more complicated they must be. They are big because they produce a huge output of telephones, say, or have a lot of welfare clients, or govern a big population. Whatever the reason for expansion, the large size creates complications. Big organizations need coordinators, liason people, prescribed channels of communication, administrators, supervisors of supervisors, whole extra departments devoted to serving the organization itself. A small organization can get by without a bureaucracy. A big one cannot.

"Bigness and the complications that go along with it have their price, but can be worth it. ... Many jobs in this world can only be done or can best be done by large units. It is as simplistic to jump to the conclusion that something smaller is necessarily better than something bigger as it is to suppose the reverse. The point is that there is always a price to be paid for bigness."


==========
Jane Jacobs
<i>Cities and the Wealth of Nations</i>
Ch. 11—Faulty Feedback To Cities

Jacobs analogizes diverse cities under a common national currency to people engaged in diverse activities connected to the same brain stem.

<blockquote>"machines this badly conceived wouldn't work. Nations, from this point of view, don't work either, yet do exist." ...

"in 1965 Singapore, with its predominantly Chinese population, was expelled from Malaysia, as the country is now called, because in the eyes of the rural Malay population of the other parts of the country, Singapore was an undesirable foreign body. As a sovereign and independent city-state, Singapore has a currency that reflects its own trade situation. Furthermore, with its expulsion, the anomaly of a shared national "brain stem" vanished."</blockquote>

I'm just a tourist in the field of economics, but I've noticed that economists love to talk about Singapore. 

The local currency idea is <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-08-07/a-depression-era-idea-gets-a-new-look-local-money">a thing</a>. It seems that mere "complementary currencies" tend to fail, because their complement is a marauding Goliath. I think that what Jacobs has in mind here is more than "complementary." Unfortunately we are quite a long way off from that.









<blockquote>One would hardly have guessed from such a discussion that thousands of the wisest minds have meditated for thousands of years over what are the most desirable characteristics in human beings, what traits should be modified or repressed, what composite character—or indeed what assortment of characters—is desirable to produce the highest order of human being.

One culture after another has framed its own answer to this problem, by bringing forth ideal types and incarnating them in an endless succession of models in their gods, heroes, saints, sages. ...

[excise for brevity] But as it has turned out, none of these models or their variants has ever been quite successful, never universally applicable. To speak only of the Greeks, neither Zeus nor Apollo, neither Prometheus nor Hephaistos nor Herakles, neither Achilles nor Odysseus meets every requirement. If we turn to the more conscious efforts of religion and philosophy to body forth an ideal human type, we are equally baffled in our choice: the Confucian, the Taoist, the Zoroastrian, the Buddhist, the Platonist, the Stoic, the Cynic, the Christian, the Mohammedan have all produced their own conceptions of the perfect man, often in defensive opposition to grosser types that had dominated earlier civilization.

But one and all these ideal forms have fallen short, even when in individual personalities they seem as close as were Socrates or Francis of Assisi, to achieving perfection within their own chosen framework. In one of the most highly developed cultures on record, the Hellenic, no consensus was ever reached.

What this means, I conclude, is that the only effective approach to this problem is that long ago taken by Nature: to provide the possibility of an endless variety of biological and cultural types, since no single one, however rich and rewarding, is capable of encompassing all the latent potentialities of man. No one culture, no one race, no one period can do more than produce fresh variations on this inexhaustible theme.

(Ch. 10-5)




























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comment to 
http://starwarsmodern.blogspot.com/2011/06/white-walls-crime-waves-part-7.html

Some thoughts this dredged up for me, apropos of nothing in particular:

A big part of Mumford's (in)famous critique of Jacobs was that

<i>"her ideal city is mainly an organization for the prevention of crime"</i> (192)

and that her book

<i>"reveals an overruling fear of living in the big city she so openly adores, and, as all New Yorkers know, she has considerable reason for her fear."</i> (191)

(from <i>The Urban Prospect</i>)

So, the funny thing is, while you are certainly correct that "In 1961 no one could have predicted how intractable a problem urban crime would turn out to be," it must be said that Jacobs did in fact make the eyes-on-the-street stuff a rather central part of her manifesto, enough to get Mumford's goat at least, and perhaps in anticipation of the old lab rat critique of density which he indeed dutifully trots out later on (and which you still hear from time to time). At that point of course they were talking past each other. (I have never been able to shake the feeling that the line <i>"she has considerable reason for her fear"</i> would have been written had she not been a woman. It's impossible to know that for sure, and probably not worth knowing anyway.)

Another thought, perusing your sidebar, is that the term Modernism has become quite slippery. The oft-quoted passage from Jacobs about <i>"the mistake of attempting to substitute art for life"</i> is prepared this way:

<i>Art has its own peculiar forms of order, and they are rigorous. Artists, whatever their medium, </i>make selections<i> from the abounding materials of life, and organize these selections into works that are under the control of the artist. To be sure, the artist has a sense that the demands of the work (i.e. of the selections of material he has made) control him. The rather miraculous result of this process—if the selectivity, the organization and the control are consistent within themselves—can be art. But the essence of this process is disciplined, highly discriminatory selectivity </i>from<i> life. In relation to the inclusiveness and the literally endless intricacy of life, art is arbitrary, symbolic and abstracted. That is its value and the source of its own kind of order and coherence.</i>

This is a prodfoundly Modernist sentiment, and the final sentence leaves me thinking that Jacobs was not merely constructing a strawman here but, rather, does in fact believe all of this. And if we believe it too, then the various postmodern efforts to substitute life for art (or to bring about their synthesis, e.g. per Debord and the Situationists), are also "mistakes" of "substitution." Which is why I once said to a friend who is more well-versed in all of this than I am that Jacobs struck me as a Modernist. He made this little smirk and was slightly taken aback.

Sadly, once I read Jacobs' later books I no longer was able to think of her as "Jedi" til the end. But that is a whole other story and I've written enough. Thanks for your blog.