How do we decide what is valuable in this world? How is it possible for things to have two types of value at the same time? Diamond rings have a type of value to all people, but a particular diamond ring has even more value to a particular person. In this life we form attachments to people, places, things, ideas and beliefs. Through a lifetime those attachments may strengthen, diminish, vanish altogether or even become aversion. Over the course of history cultural attachments follow the same trends. During times when these attachments go through change, artists, along with other trend setters, are often there, commenting, reflecting, suggesting or protesting. What processes are involved in the ebbs and flows of personal and cultural values, and what role do artists play in shaping these events?
There are two buildings that share some common traits in the town where I live. The first is the Chatham County Courthouse in Pittsboro North Carolina. It is located in the center of town, surrounded by a traffic circle and was built in 1881. The second building is the Odell Manufacturing Company, originally called the Bynum Manufacturing Company, which was built in 1872 and is generally referred to as the Bynum mill. It is located on the Haw river and the
mill village of Bynum, now a part of the Pittsboro town limits, grew up around it. Both buildings are made of brick, both are centrally located to their respective communities, both provided essential services to their residents. The Bynum Mill ceased operation as a mill around 1986, and shut down altogether after a major fire in 2000. The Chatham County Courthouse had shifted most of its court load to a new courthouse building, but was still the superior court when it burned down earlier this year in March 2010. One of these buildings is scheduled to be rebuilt, the other is scheduled to be destroyed.
There are many important differences that account for why the courthouse will arise from its ashes while the mill will disappear. The courthouse is in the center of a middle class town, visible to all that pass through, and has had a more noble mission (the production of justice being more significant than the production of cotton). It has an architectural noteworthiness that attracts visitors from nearby cities and universities. The Bynum Mill is off the beaten path, in a mixed income area that has a reputation as a quirky, artsy, yet still hill-billy community. Its architecture is nothing significant, it's tourist appeal is next to nothing.
It is possible, however, to imagine a not so far fetched world where the outcome was reversed. The Pittsboro Courthouse was recently the site of an unpleasant ruling on the handing over of a sex tape involving former presidential candidate John Edwards and his mistress. In a conservative south this could have been seen to taint the image of the courthouse, dampening the public's willingness to spend the tax dollars to rebuild. It will also be more expensive to rebuild than the Bynum Mill. Perhaps a small park in the middle of town with a memorial to the ruined building would be sufficient. The Bynum Mill, on the other hand, is the reason for the existence of a vibrant, artsy community that hosts music and art events in the summer, is preserving the old General Store as a community resource, and has even gotten permission to use the old water tower property as a community garden. If ever there was a community that could unite around the renovation of an old building, Bynum should be that place.
And yet, that is not how this story is playing out. It seems to often be the case in our world that objects that in an objective sense would seem to be in a similar class, are not treated in a similar way by individuals or the public at large. How do two related species of birds, doves and pigeons, come to be viewed so differently within our culture? What sorts of positive traits have attached themselves to the former while negative traits have clung to the latter? How do our views of the value of objects shift over time? The artwork of Van Gogh, so ignored and unpopular during his life, becomes valuable and desired shortly after his death. Symbols come to represent radically different, even opposing, things to different cultures. How do we assign and reassign value to objects beyond their mere physical and utilitarian properties? We can start to answer some of these questions with the theories of Nelson Goodman in his book Fact, Fiction and Forecast.
Goodman begins by discussing the philosophical issues related to conterfactual conditional statements. These are statements that offer what we believe to be a truthful statement about a situation that in fact did not occur. One of his first examples is, "If that piece of butter had been heated to 150 degrees F., it would have melted." (Goodman 4) The statement that the butter would have melted is predicated on the temperature reaching 150 degrees; which it, in fact, did not. Although this statement seems correct, the logical truth value is in fact false. Goodman later goes on the describe the issue in terms of dispositional predicates as opposed to manifest predicates. To find manifest predicates, "we must turn to those describing events-predicates like 'bends', 'breaks', 'dissolves','looks orange','tests square'. To apply such a predicate is to say that something specific actually happens with respect to the thing in question; while to apply a dispositional predicate is to speak only of what can happen." (Goodman 41). The butter melts at 150 degrees uses a manifest predicate, describing an actual event. Would have melted (or perhaps, is meltable) is a dispositional predicate. He follows this path to consider statements about what is possible, and how that discussion broadens the range of dispositional predicates even wider.
Goodman's final chapter in the book is deals with how we project these predicates onto future or possible circumstances. He is no longer interested in our butter, which every time it has reached 150 degrees has melted. Goodman's term for this sort of dispositional predicate is "exhausted" and not worth making hypotheses about. Projection is about predicates that are still open to debate. Some projections may in fact be false, but have not been contradicted, or violated, at a given point, therefore they can still be projected until they are violated. As we navigate the available predicates in a projection we are faced with some that are immediately shown to be false, some that are true but have become exhausted (therefore no longer a candidate for projection), “some are bizarre, and some are at odds with each other.” (Goodman 91-92) How then do we choose between the available predicates to make an accurate projection? To do this Goodman states that some predicates are more "entrenched" than others, and that if a projected predicate conflicts with a more entrenched one, we reject the less entrenched one. Sometimes we are presented with two equally well (or poorly) entrenched predicates, at which point we often defer the projection altogether until one can become more entrenched. (Goodman 95-96) He makes a point to assure us that he is not discarding unfamiliar predicates, as new predicates are being introduced all the time, they must simply become more strongly entrenched than predicates that came before them. He uses the example "conducts electricity", which by virtue of its scientific basis presumably un-entrenched "possessed by the devil" or whatever predicate people before Benjamin Franklin used to project for electrified items. It is important to note that Goodman is not actually trying to"resolve all conflicts between hypotheses, but only those where a questions of legitimacy, or validity, is involved." (Goodman 96) He wants to show how we can logically make the sort of counterfactual statements discussed in the first place, and how we can judge between good and bad projections.
In terms of glossing over an extremely detailed and painstaking theory, this is about as glossy as it gets, but it does give us a vocabulary to discuss the previous topic of how we pick some things within a class as valuable and leave others out. Essentially what we do when we ascribe value to something is project hypotheses into the future. If left alone, the Bynum Mill would be a dangerous place and someone could get hurt. Though I am currently not aware of any such string of injuries or fatalities even though the mill has been vacant for a decade, there are holes in the floor, hanging duct work, old rotted wood and many other potential hazards. Though it is not necessarily true that someone will get hurt, it has become an entrenched predicate of old buildings that they are unsafe places to be. This means we cannot leave the building as it is if we value safety. If we project rebuilding into the future, we can see a high cost (reportedly around two million dollars) for little economic return. People visit the area around the mill to walk their dogs and go fishing, not exactly high income generating past times. This leaves tearing down as the only logical option. The courthouse also must be rebuilt or torn down for the same safety considerations as the mill. It will also cost several millions to repair, but over time people will visit the courthouse which will slowly defray the cost to the town as people eat in the restaurants, purchase items at the stores and pay parking and speeding tickets.
If the only answer is a financial one, then Goodman's ideas haven't led us very far. To try and reach further into the situation, I would like to suggest that the bond that made each of these buildings meaningful to the people around them was significantly different. The people who were truly bonded to the Bynum Mill were the people who worked there and lived in the town. This is a rather complex bond since mill villages at the turn of the 20th century were notoriously difficult places to live. At the same time that the workers might have been connected to the place of the mill, they were probably much less tied to their experiences at the mill. There was less incentive for them to try and pass on their connection and feeling for the place to their children or the newcomers to the town. As they moved on or passed away, the experiences, the stories and the history upon which the value of the mill building was predicated would also pass away, making the projection of valuable traits less entrenched.
On the other hand, the connection that most people have of the courthouse is not one of direct experience. The majority of the residents of Pittsboro did not work at the courthouse, and many probably never had business there of any kind. The courthouse was in fact a symbol, first of the government and what it represented, later of the town itself because of it's location. This status as a symbol is much easier to pass on than the stories and history of the mill. Simply to circle around it day after day in the traffic circle in the center of town is enough to create that sort of bond. As a resident of the town, I, in fact, feel exactly that bond despite never having stepped foot inside the building. The connection that people had with the courthouse was never in any danger of becoming less entrenched. Thus we see that the difference between the two buildings does not lie in the physical characteristics alone, but rather the system of interconnected social, physical, environmental, and cultural ties in which they are located.
To examine this in another instance, I want to look at a subject that I have written about in the past; pigeons. Pigeons were one of the first domesticated animals, and they have been our companions ever since. Originally kept for food and later used for message carrying, entertainment, breeding and scientific experimentation, they were for hundreds of years one of the most valuable birds mankind had ever tamed. Today, for much of the world, the situation is very different. They are a pest, a vector for disease, and a species that causes hundred of thousands of dollars of damage to property nation wide. How can a species, in the course of about fifty years, undergo such a drastic transformation?
In this situation I believe Goodman would say that both of the predicated value judgments, that pigeons are valuable and that pigeons are pests, would have existed together and been almost equally entrenched for many hundreds of years. Those people who owned pigeons, raced them, or raised them for food, existed in a system that allowed them to view pigeons as being valuable and project that value into the future. Those that did not have a connection to pigeons, would likely have seen them as much of a nuisance as we do today. Ultimately, however, the system of the pigeon keepers changed, and the activities that gave the pigeon value slowly disappeared. Pigeons are not suitable for large industrial farming, so they were soon replaced by chickens. The invention of the telegraph made them obsolete for message purposes. The sport of pigeon racing slowly faded. There are still plenty of pockets of pigeon appreciators left, but their voice could no longer compete with the voice of Woody Allen in Stardust Memories when he famously called them "rats with wings". This view established itself as the entrenched one, and now when we see a pigeon on the street, if we project anything at all, we project that we might just come out dirtier for the encounter.
This process of systemic shift and the unforeseen consequences that result from it apply to more than just history, but art, politics, ecology, biology or any other system that assigns value to certain traits and goes through a process of evolution. Imagine the dramatic shift in the value of the artwork of Van Gogh, as mentioned above. Shortly after his death two memorial exhibits were arranged and the result was dramatic. From never having sold a painting during his lifetime to shortly after his suicide having interest in his work grow seemingly exponentially to the point of his works selling for tens of millions of dollars at auction mere decades later. This change in fortune is surely one of the most dramatic the art world has to offer. Was it necessary for him to have to die in order for his work to gain so much traction with viewers? If he had quietly lived out his life in the asylum painting landscapes and flowers, would we speak his name with such reverence today? It seems more likely that the shock of his death on the system in which he lived made it possible for other artists and the public to see his work differently, allowing his value to become more entrenched. This may eventually have happened anyway, but at a much different pace.
This dynamic is hardly restricted to the human world. As we enter a period of potentially dramatic shifts in the ecology of our planet, species that have been selected for specific traits may find their strengths rendered useless, like the homing ability of the pigeon, while others may find surprising uses for traits that have laid dormant. An article in the New Yorker in December of 2009 chronicled the work of Bill Fraser, an ecologist, and his work with Adelie
penguins and global warming. One of the findings in the 1980's that surprised him was that while another type of penguin, the chinstrap penguin, was gaining in population, the Adelie penguin numbers were dropping. Some scientists tried to explain the rise in chinstrap penguins entirely as a result of over hunting of whales that consumed the same food source as the penguins, krill. With fewer whales there was more krill, thus more penguins. But the drop in Adelie numbers did not fit this hypothesis. Fraser knew that chinstrap penguins prefer open water, while Adelie penguins live on the sea ice. There had been a warming trend since the 1950's, and the sea ice did not develop in as many winters, making it harder for the Adelie's to reach as far out to sea as they needed in order to reach their feeding grounds. Many more Adelie's died during these warmer winters, while chinstrap penguins, more comfortable in the open water, were able to take advantage of the increased food source now that competition from the whales and from the Adelies had been restricted. (Montaigne 77-78)
Such is the way of specialized traits. The Adelie penguins are like the Bynum Mill in this sense. The way in which they evolved to connect to their environment is much less adaptable to the particular systemic changes they find themselves facing. They need a more specific set of circumstance to exist in order for their way of life to continue to be entrenched, so to speak. The chinstrap penguins, on the other hand, require less specifics of their environment in order to thrive. Like the Pittsboro Courthouse, their world can change drastically, though not completely, and they will still be able to survive.
It is very interesting to note that our cultural views of what is valuable in the natural world is often at odds with what holds high value in an evolutionary sense. We tend to like the beautiful but fragile species; the species that have a tenuous hold on their environment. They become symbolic to us. We can feel connected to them without ever having direct experience with them, like the courthouse. Bald eagles, California condors, polar bears, red wolves, bluebirds and many other rare or threatened species are valued by us despite a lack of personal connection. Many of the species we value the least are the most adaptable, such as pigeons, starlings, crows, mice, rats, snakes and insects. Would we be as concerned about the ecological impacts of global warming if the projected result was that bluebirds, hummingbirds and monarch butterflies would become more numerous while mosquito, starling and pigeon populations would plummet? If poison ivy and kudzu would disappear while chestnut trees would sprout? It doesn't seem likely.
It is; however, a hazard of items with strong symbolic positions within their system that they can experience radical reversals in fortune. One of the most dramatic examples of this is the swastika, a symbol that has been used for thousands of years and in many different religions and cultures, and has generally been interpreted as a good luck charm. It's use by the Nazi's has tainted the symbol for the western world and it has become a symbol for hatred or racism as it continues to be used by Neo-Nazi's today. This shift in a symbol's value is an example of a new projected predicate coming into existence to supplant a previous one. In the early 1900's I might have seen someone wearing a swastika pin and assumed it was a good luck charm; today I might assume that the wearer was violent or full of hate. The result of my projection would be to not make eye contact. The reverse example in nature is the Grey Wolf, which was once such a hated symbol of untamed wilderness that they were nearly hunted to extinction, yet now are emblems of modern wildlife conservation efforts.
That is why earlier I proposed that it is not impossible to imagine a possible world where the courthouse had become a negative symbol for the surrounding community. On the one hand there was the mentioned ruling on the John Edwards sex tape (which sadly did not burn in the fire as it was not in the courthouse), on the other there is the statue of the confederate soldier standing out front. It doesn't take much to imagine that a shift in demographics in the town and the residents might feel quite differently about the fire, perhaps seeing it as God's will or as a fitting end to a confederate monument (also sadly, the statue did not burn down). In the possible world imagined for the Bynum mill, a new group of people gained a direct connection to the mill building, new residents of the town living in the houses built for the mill workers. In this possible world, these residents band together to raise money, petition the state, file a lawsuit, get the building on the register of historical sites. A similar personal connection to the building that the original mill workers had would be rekindled.
And now, at last, we come to the artists place in this process of placing value by projecting predicates and giving form to possible worlds in which the predicates are shown to be true. The way things gain or lose value is by their connections with the people around them. An object can be valuable because of a strong personal connection to a group of people, or have a more vague symbolic meaning to a larger group of people. The symbolic meaning can radically shift if the object comes to represent something other than what it originally did, and the object can become valueless if the people or activities that were tied to the object disappear. The job of the artist is to explore the possible worlds and attempt to bind more tightly, or try to break apart, the currently entrenched predicates.
Artists have at various times found themselves in the service of, and in opposition to, the existing status of an object, place or institution. The church of San Francisco de Asis in Taos, New Mexico is an example of a building that was made more valuable by the actions of many painters and photographers who depicted it. It may have survived on it's own as simply a historical place, but the added history of the artists who worked there has entrenched its value in our culture to the point where it is hard to imagine it being deliberately destroyed. When we look at it we project positive effects and benefits into the future; benefits that would be greater than if it was destroyed to make way for a super Wal-Mart or used car dealership. Monet's garden at Giverny stands as a testament to the value that one artist can give to a place. Maintained much like it was in his day, thousands of people visit to see the place that inspired his work for the last decades of his life. The writings of John Muir helped spur on the modern ecological movement and are largely responsible for some of the most significant of our national parks. On the other hand the photographs of Lewis Hine challenged our accepted values with regards to child labor. His photographs tipped the balance between those who wanted to exploit the efforts of children and those who felt it was morally wrong. Every photograph was new evidence of a manifest predicate that made it easier to project the negative results of child labor; not that it could be harmful, but that it was harmful in each documented image, and these manifest predicates are what we base our projections on. In this instance it became harder and harder to see the value of child labor as a strongly entrenched projection.
In the construct of Goodman's theory, that is what a piece of art is, a manifest predicate; an actual event. Even though the image or sculpture itself may not in fact portray factual events, the artwork becomes an event in itself that the viewer is forced to work into their entrenched experiences of the world. Those viewers who feel strongly opposed to the predicate being presented in the work are not likely to have their views changed immediately, but over time and with repetition, those actual events might come to affect how the viewer projects their value judgments. In the same way, artists can reinforce existing value judgments for those viewers who agree with the vision of the world as presented in the artwork. In this way the artist seeks to do what the scientist should not. The artist tries to become embedded in the system upon which it is commenting, thus affecting the outcome of the system itself.
Some systems are harder to effect than others, of course. I have found that the projected predicate of the negative value of pigeons is not very strongly entrenched for many people. Most people to whom I have shown my work and discussed my discoveries about pigeons have responded by telling me of their own observations, or their increased awareness of behavior. Several have rewarded me with pictures they have taken or articles they have read. It is not hard to change your opinion of pigeons. For most it does not require any effort on their part other than to refrain from speaking badly or putting out poison. My interest in the Bynum Mill
is more difficult to translate into systemic change. There is money and vested interests involved. In order to save the mill buildings, action would have to be taken to make it safe and keep it safe. It is possible that my artwork could be a factor in galvanizing local opinion that something should be done, but it must necessarily play a smaller role in any change in value judgement, or must become much larger in scope. It is always possible; however, that a change of a few degrees can be the difference between survival and destruction, as the Adelie penguins sadly are the proof.This is the goal of the artist who hopes to affect change in the world in relation to a specific issues or event, no matter how seemingly impossible the outcome is. But the artist should take solace from Goodman’s view that, “what we often mistake for the actual world is one particular description of it. And what we mistake for possible worlds are just equally true descriptions in other terms. We have come to think of the actual as one among many possible worlds. We need to repaint that picture. All possible worlds lie within the actual one.” (Goodman 57) Art is one of a handful of activities that can help us shift possible worlds into the actual one.
