Critical Critical Theory Theory
“If music theory is so flawed, what would you have us replace it with?” – Basic Trope of The White Racial Frame and White Privilege (Philip Ewell, “Music Theory and the White Racial Frame”, section 7.2)
This is Part 5 of Philip Ewell Go Down In History — to be published in installments; updates will be noted here (updated June 12, 2024)
Message Received
Part 3 of this article summarized Philip Ewell’s beliefs about the white racial frame as it operates in music theory and elsewhere in the world of music, Part 4 covered the fear, intimidation and control tactics Ewell has in mind to apply and enforce his ideas. This fifth section lays a groundwork to formulate a way to respond to Critical Race Theory that avoids replicating the self-defeating attempts covered thus far, exemplified by the Journal of Schenkerian Studies and others. The goal is to locate a means whereby those musicians and lovers of music who do not share the values of Critical Race Theory may be freed from its social and psychological grip, and may continue studying, playing, or hearing work they find meaningful both in private and in public .
We can begin by stating that the message is loudly and clearly heard. The indictments Critical Race Theory makes against whiteness and maleness (white people and male people), exemplified in the work of Philip Ewell, are many and severe. The accountability it places upon them is heavy and grave. This section of the article responds commensurately, treating these claims and charges with the utmost seriousness.
To do so without slipping into the twin traps of argumentation or apology, covered in part 2 and part 4, is no simple task, and all possible resources will be brought to bear. As a result, much of this section will provoke strong reactions in individuals who are sympathetic to value systems such as Critical Race Theory, as part 3 did for those who are not.
It is noted there is no requirement to continue reading if this seems uncomfortable.
Critical Theory’s “White Male Frame”
Ideas such as framing, equality, human rights, or systems theory, upon which claims of systemic oppression rely, did not arise with nature. They had to be thought up by human beings, developed, disseminated, and applied, and as such are an inheritance, a shared intellectual property. When a particular idea, such as a “framing” or “power structures” comes into common use within a field or society at large, that idea may be felt to be, in a sense, “public domain”, part of a vocabulary to which everyone is entitled, without any special accountability.
But Critical Theory presents itself here with a unique dilemma that I will now begin to unpack.
Nowhere in his citation chains does Philip Ewell reference the intellectual roots of Critical Race Theory. In the fifth part of his noted blog post, he cities Sara Ahmed, who “adopts a simple citation policy: she does not cite any white men” (emphasis mine). Possibly, this and similar attitudes have permitted the belief that Critical Race Theory is original, that scholars such as Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Richard Delgado, Cheryl Harris, Sara Ahmed herself, and the others they all cite in turn, invented it from first principles. Since advanced academic degrees can now be earned without learning the history of Western thought, it is also possible many are not aware Critical Theory relies on at least two centuries’ prior work.
Dr. Derrick Bell was a Harvard professor of law who, during the 1970s, wrote the first texts now known as Critical Race Theory and is known for coining the field’s name. Bell’s work is widely known among race scholars and will not be covered here, except to note that in fact, Bell coined only the middle word of the field, “Race” inserting it between the two words of a much earlier field, Critical Theory. Critical Theory originated in Germany in 1933 and is occasionally misunderstood, due to having originated the name, to have had close ideological alignment with Critical Race Theory. But its relation to modern American Critical Race Theory is distant.
American Critical Race Theory of the 1970s was most closely related to a field called Critical Legal Studies that enjoyed popularity both in academia and the practice of law in America and Britain during the 1960s and 1970s. Critical Legal Studies advanced that the law serves hidden interests of the dominant class with the purpose to “maintain the status quo”, wording Philip Ewell has frequently used. Critical Legal Studies, however, cannot be credited with originating that idea, rather only with its application to law. The generation that populated Critical Legal Studies had lived through the two decades encompassing the American Civil Rights movement, the women’s rights movement, numerous other youth political movement, and the gradual disillusionment with American leadership and politics that culminated in the Vietnam War and its aftermath. Though Critical Legal Studies owes much in turn to another American predecessor, Legal Realism, its lineage until 1970 is mostly in European thought.
Disenchanted with America, Critical Legal Studies scholars turned to several non-American sources, the most popular among these being Marxism and Deconstructionism. At that time, the work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels — together, Marxism — were over a century old and had spawned several national revolutions and played a role in two world wars. Deconstructionism was a younger field entering its second generation. Jacques Derrida, who rejected the term “deconstructionism” while being yet its most prominent figure, originated much of the language that would later, in English translation, find appropriation into Critical Race Theory: “close reading,” “grand narratives,” “questioning assumptions,” “dominant discourses,” the special use of the term “text”, and so on. The philosopher Michel Foucault originated much of Critical Race Theory’s repertory of language and method to examine and expose mechanisms of social control and the idea of “knowledge power.”
Preceding Deconstructionism by a few decades was the Frankfurt School at the Institute for Social Research at Goethe University in Germany. Its founding philosophers originated the field “Critical Theory.” They included Erich Fromm, Max Horkheimer, Otto Kirchheimer, Walter Benjamin, Jürgen Habermas and Theodor Adorno. It happens that Adorno, usually considered the founder and principle thinker of Frankfurt Critical Theory, was a pianist and musicologist.
If the Critical Race Theory literature in America is vast and dense, the Frankfurt School dwarfs it in complexity and unapproachability, especially to non German-speakers. To form just an overview requires some understanding of the philosophy of Kant and Shopenhauer, the philosophical and economic writings of Karl Marx, the many causes of the First World War, and finally the social and political conditions of Weimar Germany that contributed to the exploitation of the working class. It can hardly be supposed more than a small number of persons in the world possess sufficient undertanding of this history to assess the soundness of its eventual application to the problems of a time and society unknown to its authors.
The Frankfurt School would not have anticipated Critical Race Theory might one day undermine its own origins by imputing the European culture in which it germinated as race-exclusionary and white supremacist. Rather, the Frankfurt School was concerned with class. Their goal was the “total liberation from ideologies” via critique of social and political power structures — that is, by examining how and where power is located and operates. DEI and antiracism as understood in contemporary America were not what they had in mind. Frankfurt Critical Thoery was interested in conveying their understanding to a small population of sufficiently capable intellects.
Theodor Adorno focused in particular on the impact of capitalism upon the public audience for music and, in turn, upon the composers who wrote for that audience, whom he viewed with scorn. His Philosophy of New Music advocates an aesthetic elitism in which the few composers able to comprehend (Frankfurt) Critical Theory, working in deliberate isolation from public recognition or material reward, pushed musical progress toward “truth.” This, Adorno believed, was possible only by rejecting tonal systems of the past and adopting studied disinterest in public demands of any sort. To the extent that Adorno’s Critical Theory was concerned with liberation at all, it was for a small number of academic composers, from the base expectations of a mass public degraded by capitalist commodification. When speaking of liberation, then, the Frankfurt School meant liberation for themselves from the public, not for the public. Adorno volunteers that his is an elitist philosophy, reserved for a select few, their primary audience being one another, to the explicit exclusion of those who could not comprehend. By the time Adorno co-authored The Authoritarian Personality in 1949, Critical Theory itself already bore many features of an authoritarian ideology.
Frankfurt Critical Theory was, like the fields mentioned above, a response to the perceived failure of several previous economic, social and political philosophies. It aligned to some extent with Marxism, though it criticized certain applications of it. It was more heavily indebted to the philosophies of Hegel and Heidegger, who in turn were responding with varying degrees of dissent to German Idealism as formulated by Kant and extended by Schopenhauer.
This sprawling lineage of thought presents no unified front. Debate among and within groups, fields and subfields could be acrimonious, with schism playing a large role in the rapid multiplication of specialized sub-branches and movements: intersectionality, Legal Positivism, Pragmatism, Postcolonial Theory, Poststructuralism, Critical Geography, Anarchism, Decolonial Theory, and more recently, Critical Disability Studies, Queer Theory, Environmental Justice, each successive wave of feminism, the cross-purposes of various schisms within the Civil Rights movement culminating in the Black Power movement, and so on.
As a general if oversimplified summary, each group or field arose in response to the shortfall of one or more of the previous, in a cycle of theory, then application, leading at times to revolution or temporary improvement, and finally some form of disorder or catastrophe. By the time each theory achieved application, events had made them inadequate, leading to the need for new theory. To borrow from one of the few fields to recognize this problem, Cybernetics, each theory was “one hundred percent prepared for yesterday.”
To exercise some humility against this enormous historical cycle before placing faith in new theory might have been a good proposal. But the perceived urgency to act on problems of the moment usually prevented any notice that the theory-praxis loop was in most cases unpredictable. This surfaces in the destabilizing actions of Critical Theorists, such as in Philip Ewell’s certainty that “everyone benefits,” and his flippant admission, on the other hand, that “where we will end up, I do not know.”
That Adorno’s intellectual starting points in Frankfurt Critical Theory, to take just one example, were also the antecedents for the contemporary vision of forced inclusion policies in academic music, such as advocated in Philip Ewell’s 2019 plenary paper, is an awesomely enigmatic historical spectacle. It is not the unsoundness of any particular worldview, but the demonstration that from Critical Theory can be deduced such mutually irreconcilable worldviews, that betrays Critical Theory’s fundamental indifference to any moral, artistic or political principle. Tremendous respect to the power of redefinition is due when words such as “liberation”, “ideology” and “progress” may be used in service of mutually exclusive ends.
The only idea all these fields and movements shared, without exception, was that society could and should critique itself, then apply the critique to modify itself. This is a formulation of the central idea of the Enlightenment: that reason and science could be applied to improve humanity.
If one chooses to focus on race and gender (which I do not, but must momentarily in reference to Philip Ewell), American Critical Theory, including Critical Race Theory and all forms of intersectional Theory, is a synthesis of mostly white, mostly male, and mostly European thought. That some may read that fact with outrage or disbelief demonstrates how thoroughly Critical Theory, by appropriation and selective citation, has erased all vestiges of its ideological debt to the history it condemns.
Far removed by now from its original environment and purposes, the language and tools accumulated from Critical Theory and all its related thinkers furnish a value-agnostic means to deconstruct or intimidate, any set of beliefs or values that happen to prevail, according to and limited by only the interests of the practitioner. Here again, Critical Theory enacts, by inversion, the system from which it originally sought liberation, replacing one authority with another: itself.
“If music theory is so flawed, what would you have us replace it with?”, asks one of the white male framed tropes Ewell caricatures in his 2019 plenary paper. In imaginary response he writes, “This is a deceptive tactic. By switching immediately to a discussion of alternatives, the white frame seeks to change the subject. First there must be a reckoning with respect to the white racial frame, and a rigorous analysis of its effects. Further, no one person should be responsible to offer an alternative to centuries of white racial framing.”
The replacement hides in plain sight: it is Critical Theory.
Misappropriation
In The White Racial Frame, from which Philip Ewell’s work was drawn, sociologist Joe Feagin begins using the term “frame” as early as the Preface, without even explaining what it means, or mentioning that it is not his own idea. Though Feagin coined the “white racial frame”, he did so, like Derrick Bell, out of an extant concept.
Framing, like Critical Theory, has a history independent of race scholarship to which Feagin, along with the whole of sociology and many other fields, are indebted. Only once in the book does Feagin provide attribution for framing, in a footnote, and only to pages 1 – 20 of the source.
Race scholarship relies so heavily on tools such as framing that its silence on their origins, and its selective avoidance of their complexities, while not plagiaristic, amount to highly problematic misappropriation. With a PhD from Harvard University (1966), and as both a contributor and beneficiary of the American academic establishment, Joe Feagin’s failure to adequately credit and explain framing, and his omission of its many complex and inconvenient implications upon his idea of the “white racial frame”, is inexcusable.
Erving Goffman and Frame Analysis
The Jewish Canadian-American sociologist, psychologist and anthropologist Erving Goffman introduced the concept of framing to mainstream academia and the public in his 1974 book Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Goffman credits numerous previous thinkers: William James, Alfred Shutz, Harold Garfinkel, Luigi Pirandello, John Austin, Ludwig Wittgenstein, D.S. Swchayder, Barney Glaser, Anselm Strauss, William T. Cone, Jacob Brackman, and Gregory Bateson. “I have borrowed extensively from all these sources, claiming really only the bringing of them together,” he writes.
It will be helpful to provide a clear account of what a frame is, since Feagin does not: A frame is a way to organize experience, consciously or otherwise, around parameters that provide meaning. In Goffman’s words, a frame tells us “what is going on.”
“…[E]ach primary framework allows its user to locate perceive, identify, and label a seemingly infinite number of concrete occurrences defined in its terms. He is likely to be unaware of such organized features as the framework has and unable to describe the framework with any completeness if asked, yet these handicaps are no bar to his easily and fully applying it.”
Goffman’s twenty page introduction illustrates a primary feature of framing, reflexivity: every frame can be framed. On page sixteen, seeming to be finished, Goffman writes, “That is the introduction.” Then he comments that introductions frame books’ contents. Then, he asks what role commenting on the role of introductions plays, wondering if doing so influences the reader’s own framing of the book. Each of six further asterisk-separated sections frames the previous, frame around frame, culminating in a final sentence framing all of them: “That is what frame analysis is about.”
Possibly, the reason Feagin cites only pages 1 – 20 is that pages 21 – 576 make clear that framing does not accomplish what Feagin wishes it to do. In fact, Frame Analysis will shortly turn out to pose several inconveniences to Feagin’s purpose. Framing, Goffman writes, is not about “depending on or harking back to some prior or ‘original’ interpretation,” nor is he concerned with social structures or society at large. Framing is rather an activity that everyone does all the time. “What is going on” may be several simultaneous things, at multiple levels of meaning, interpretable to individuals in different ways. Goffman is clear that meaning is “not dependent on a closed, finite set of a rules.” To assume a particular frame is to select among many, possibly infinite, ways to organize the same experience. This article frames the work of Philip Ewell, and this sentence frames this article.
Feagin’s primary error, besides misunderstanding framing in the first place, is that he fails to locate exactly the frame he is looking for: What he wishes to say is that all white people frame experience around racially white priorities, and that white people take this particular frame to be not a frame at all, but rather the best and ultimate way to define what is true, real, important, and just.
That is not a frame. Feagin wishes to frame “the white racial frame” as an ideology.
Ideology
[ to be published shortly ]