The problem of genre explosion

ABSTRACT

Genre discourse is widespread in appreciative practice. It should be no surprise then, that philosophers of art have also been interested in genre and in genres. However, in their accounts, philosophers have so far focused on capturing all of the categories of art that we think of as genres and have focused less on ensuring that only the categories we think are genres are captured by those theories. Each of these theories populates the world with far too many genres because they call a wide class of mere categories of art genres. I call this the problem of genre explosion. In this paper, I survey the existing accounts of genre and describe the kinds of considerations they employ in determining whether a work is a work of a given genre. After this, I demonstrate the ways in which the problem of genre explosion arises for all of these theories and discuss some solutions those theories could adopt that will ultimately not work. Finally, I argue that the problem of genre explosion is best solved by adopting a social view of genres, which can capture the difference between genres and mere categories of art.

KEYWORDS:

• Aesthetics
• philosophy of art
• genre
• aesthetic practices

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank P.D. Magnus, Ron McClamrock, Jon Mandle, the attendees of the 72nd Annual Meeting of the Texas-New Mexico Philosophical Society, and the attendees of the 38th Annual Meeting of the Rocky Mountain Division of the American Society for Aesthetics for their very helpful feedback on earlier drafts of this paper. I would also like to thank an anonymous reviewer and the editor of this journal for their incredibly helpful feedback on this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This schema builds off of one introduced by Terrone, between genres-as-concepts and genres-as-traditions (Terrone 2021). Here, I refer to what Terrone calls genres-as-concepts as genres-as-features in order to distinguish it from genres-as-functional-kinds, since both functional kinds and sets of features are kinds of concepts.

2 France Fabbri and Iain Chambers have also defended a prototype version of this view (Fabbri and Chambers 1982; Fabbri 2012). This account is supposed to explain how genres take on the features we associate with them but, as in the case of the other views, we are still supposed to look at characteristic sets of features internal to the work in determining whether a work is a work of that genre. As such, what is said of other genres-as-features views also applies to the prototype account as well.

3 Importantly, Carroll’s account of genre argues that the work (1) have the relevant intended function and (2) have the right particular means of bringing that function about (Carroll 2009; Carroll 2016). For instance, being a work of horror might require the intention for the work to scare us and the intention to scare us through the presence of a monster. In this way, a certain feature is required. The account is included as a theory of genres-as-functional-kinds because the relevant feature is subordinate to the function that feature aims to fulfill.

4 Friend’s genres-as-features account requires that the relevant features play a role in the appreciation of particular works. In this way, we can exclude categorizations of works which aren’t appreciatively relevant from our list of genres. However, if appreciation here means something like understanding and evaluating works, then there will still be categorizations which fit the criteria and which, nevertheless, do not strike us as genres. For instance, we might think it is relevant for understanding and appreciating the At the Drive-In album Acrobatic Tenement, that it is their only album not featuring Tony Hajjar on drums. However, works of this kind (without Tony Hajjar) don’t seem to constitute a genre, even though there are plenty of them. In any event, it is important to note that Friend’s view is more nuanced than a simple genres-as-features view and, in that way, comes closer to avoiding the problem of genre explosion than others.

5 It may be that the genres-as-traditions view can avoid the problem of genre explosion by adopting a disjunctive account along the lines mentioned here, but working out the details of such a view is outside the scope of this paper.

6 The genre Platonist will argue that genres are, indeed, discovered and not invented. However, folk and critical linguistic practice seems to more closely reflect their being invented. Artists are often said to have ‘created’ or ‘invented’ new genres and are seldom said to discover them. This gives us some prima facie reason to find invention to be a more attractive story than discovery. Platonists will have the challenge of explaining why artists, audiences, and critics so often get this wrong.

7 Likewise, others have argued against any form of genre intentionalism (Collingwood 1938). See Ridley (2002) for a more detailed discussion of this argument.

8 Hard intentionalism will also struggle because it requires that works have unambiguous intentions. We might worry about aggregating intentions for works produced by groups of artists, or in cases where the intentions of the artist are unavailable to us.

9 Aesthetic practices can be thought of broadly here, but might best be described according to the account offered in (Kubala 2020).

10 Another reason to prefer this view over genre Platonism is that it captures the fact that genre membership is taken to be reason enough to shape our aesthetic practices. If asked why their music is so heavy, a musical group may respond by saying ‘because we’re a metal band’. This is descriptively true and explanatorily satisfactory. No further justification is needed. An exploded or Platonist view of genre will not appropriately track this feature of genre because there are plenty of other equally descriptively accurate categories that a given work will fall into, all of which are taken to be genres, and which don’t provide us with reason enough to shape our aesthetic practices (be that fan appreciation or artistic production).