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The Special Liveliness
of Hooks in Popular
Music and Beyond
Steven G. Smith
The Special Liveliness of Hooks in Popular Music
and Beyond
 Steven G. Smith

The Special Liveliness

of Hooks in Popular
Music and Beyond
Steven G. Smith
Jackson, MS, USA

ISBN 978-3-031-23975-5    ISBN 978-3-031-23976-2 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23976-2

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
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 To Bruce,
my Revealer
 Acknowledgments

The book that more than any other opened the field of aesthetic reflection
to me was Susanne Langer’s Feeling and Form, and I hope to have paid
tribute to Langer by thinking freshly about the powers of art and art forms.
I was fortunate to learn some basic concepts of music theory from high
school and college teachers. In later life, I’ve learned a great deal about
popular music aesthetics from discussions with Ted Ammon, Allen Burrows,
Steve Esthimer, Rien Fertel, Bruce Golden, Howard Pickett, and Katy
Smith. And I’ve been enlightened on many points of interest by my fellow
writers on the Hooks website (hooksanalysis.wordpress.com): Jonathan
Bellman, Richard Grant, Eric Griffin, Matt Smith, and the too-­ soon-­
departed Andrew Goodwin.
I’m heavily indebted to art historian Elise Smith for my awareness and
interpretation of visual art works, and for a lot of great feedback on my
writing. I also got some good suggestions for this book from an anony-
mous reader for the press.
Some years ago Annie Blazer gave me a brilliant piece of advice that led
to the creation of most of my “grab-backs.”
An earlier version of Appendix B appeared in my article “Hooks” in The
Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 67 (Summer 2009), pp. 311–319.
Without the encouragement and astute guidance of my editor, Robin
James, this book would not exist.

S.G.S.
Jackson, Mississippi
January 2023

vii
 Contents

1 Introduction  1

2 Some
 Relevant Aesthetic Principles  7
Special Liveliness   8
Usable Models  14
Ringing Realizations  18

3 Inauguration Hooks 25
What Is It to Start?  25
Characterization  28
Gateways  30
Transgression  31
The Beginning of a Beautiful Friendship  34
Inauguration Hooks in Other Art Forms  36

4 Problem Hooks 41
Problems of Musical Tone  43
Problems of Passion and Attitude  45
Problems of Time  53
Nifting  58
Problem Hooks in Other Art Forms  60

ix
x Contents

5 Resolution Hooks 65
Examining the Elements  65
Concentration  71
Demonstration  73
The Decisive Synthesis  77
The Potent Blend  78
Repurposing  79
The Grand Solution  79
Resolution Hooks in Other Art Forms  80

6 Termination Hooks 85
The Plenary; The Lush  87
So Be It: The Amen and the Fiat  87
The Clear-Your-Palate; The Hand-You-Over  88
The Twist  89
The End as New Summons  90
From Cosmos to Chaos  90
The Nifty  92
Termination Hooks in Other Art Forms  92

7 Interlude: Are There Bad Hooks? 97

8 The
 Problem of Love103
The Problem of Physical Urgency 105
The Platonic Problem 106
The Sartrean Problem 110
The Patriarchal Problem 113
The Greatest “I Love You” 115
Love Hooks in Other Art Forms 115

9 The
 Problem of the People121
The Musical Mobilization of Pronouns 122
Dances for Everyone 125
The People in Crisis 127
Utopia and Dystopia 128
The Geographical People 131
The Historical People 133
The Religious People 134
People Hooks in Other Art Forms 137
 Contents  xi

10 Hooks
 in the Development of Aesthetic Interpretation141
Qualities to Identify 141
Complexities to Sort Out 145
Implications to Unpack 151
Master Metaphors and Models to Install 153
Resources for Interpretation in Other Art Forms 156

11 Epilogues161
A 161
B 162

Appendix A: More Detailed Analyses of Some Time Hooks165

Appendix B: Larger-Scale Interpretation: Hooks in Andrei

Rublev173

Index177
 About the Author

Steven G. Smith is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and Religious

Studies at Millsaps College. He is the author of The Argument to the Other
(1983), The Concept of the Spiritual (1988), Gender Thinking (1992),
Worth Doing (2004), Appeal and Attitude (2005), Full History (2017),
Centering and Extending (2017), Scriptures and the Guidance of Language
(2018), Full Responsibility (2022), and journal articles in ethics, aesthet-
ics, and philosophy of religion. He is also a recording artist with The
Assemblers and Woodpecker Street and writes music for theater. He is the
main writer and moderator for the Hooks website, h ­ ooksanalysis.word-
press.com.

xiii
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 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

The great last shot in Truffaut’s film The 400 Blows (1959) shows the
young protagonist Antoine Doinel wandering alone on the beach, seem-
ing to have no direction home. (Note that I’ve just borrowed a great
phrase from a work in another genre, Dylan’s song “Like a Rolling Stone”
[1965].)1 When I think back on The 400 Blows, or Truffaut, I may recall
the beach shot and reconstruct my Truffaut experience from it. It’s one of
a number of vivid bits in the film that have affected my sense of human life
(along with the ecstatic shot of Antoine in the centrifuge, the little kids
entranced at the puppet show, and the funny pronunciations in Antoine’s
English class).
For the last ten years, the monthly film magazine Sight and Sound has
run an Endings feature on its last page with short essays on final shots that
are charged with meaning like the shot of Antoine on the beach.2 These
final shots evidently hold the status of great hooks (again, using language
from the realm of popular song), and the essays support several notions of
broad relevance: first, that a particular component of a work of art can be
decisively influential on an aesthetic experience; second, that we can
declare ourselves and enrich our relationships with each other by freely

1
“How does it feel?/To be on your own, with no direction home/A complete unknown,
like a rolling stone” (second chorus, “Like a Rolling Stone”).
2
It started in September 2012, with an essay on the finale of The Third Man (Carol
Reed, 1949).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2023
S. G. Smith, The Special Liveliness of Hooks in Popular Music and
Beyond, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23976-2_1
2 S. G. SMITH

picking out such components for appreciative attention, using artistic

hooks as personal hooks; and third, that such components can reward our
close attention richly, disclosing objective grounds for our appreciative
response to them and furnishing valuable insight into how artworks work
and how meaningful experience is constituted.
In many of our experiences of art (and not only of art), there are capti-
vating singularities that are salient for us aesthetically and that may deserve
to be salient in criticism, as in the Endings essays. To be sure, art criticism
does often focus on such singularities: almost any serious critical assessment
will cite notable lines in a literary work, or notable motifs in a musical
work, or notable specifics of composition in a picture. But the main goal
of art criticism is normally to construct an interpretation of a whole work,
to which the component values are strictly subordinated. After all, one
must see what the work makes of its elements; only then can one rightly
see what is a crux or high point in it. And aesthetic theory tends to be well
aligned with art criticism in this regard: the meaning of the experience of
the part is ruled by the meaning of the experience of the whole, the whole-­
quality best exemplifying the essential character of aesthetic experience in
that artistic mode or in general.3 For hook criticism, in contrast, the expe-
rience of the whole is deeply stamped by the experience of the part. The
specific genius of the part gets its due. In paying that tribute, enthusiastic
perceptions of the part are fully licensed to generate meaning.
“Hooks” is an apt word to use for aesthetic reflection on captivating
singularities—so I wager—but it may seem to be tainted by some unsavory
associations. For at least a century, the term has combined a sense of being
almost hopelessly caught with a certain awareness of what the captor is up
to, like the prostitute “hooker” or the salesperson with the “sales hook”;
the term seems especially well suited for commercial pop music because
often that cleverly designed, captivating thing repeats through a pop song
and is enjoyed in frequently repeated listening experiences (as of songs
played on the radio or on records or running through one’s head), so that
the listener feels snagged.
In music, one usually hears of hooks in two sorts of calculation: on the
side of production, hooks are the well-made compact devices (the catchy
riffs, rhythms, and refrains) that predictably attach listeners to the prod-
uct; on the side of consumption as guided by mass-market reviews, hooks

3
I illustrate this point with reference to Hegel’s, Dewey’s, and Langer’s aesthetic theories
in “Hooks,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 67 (2009), pp. 311–319.
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

are the delivered goods that will assuredly satisfy listeners.4 Prefigured and
manipulative, hooks might seem antithetical to fresh expression in authen-
tic art, or—thinking of Adorno’s concerns in his attack on the “culture
industry”—to sincere openness or serious thought by artist or audience.5
Drawing from theatrical experience, the filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein
took stock of the “attractions” (i.e., hooks) at the disposal of the artist:
“The attraction (in our diagnosis of the theater) is every aggressive
moment in it, i.e., every element of it that brings to light in the spectator
those senses or that psychology that influence his experience—every ele-
ment that can be verified and mathematically calculated to produce certain
emotional shocks in a proper order within the totality.” Attractions are
things like “the ‘chatter’ of [the actor] Ostuzhev no more than the pink
tights of the prima-donna, a roll on the kettledrums as much as Romeo’s
soliloquy, the cricket on the hearth no less than the cannon fired over the
heads of the audience.”6
Did Eisenstein really mean to put art on the level of cookery? If so,
should we resist this way of thinking?
There is an important issue here, but I think it won’t be helpful to be a
purist totally opposed to prefiguration and manipulation in art and aes-
thetic experience. Artists who could not prefigure and manage their
“attractions” at all would be helplessly open-minded improvisers, clueless
creators. Audiences who had no definite expectations to be fulfilled at all
would have, if they were lucky, a succession of amazing experiences but
not a coherent career of experiencing the powers of an art form.
In any case, the core of the hook concept that I propose is not that
attachment or satisfaction is deliberately designed, whether for a commer-
cial or any other sort of purpose. Many hooks have been designed, cer-
tainly, but the core of the concept is that attachment and satisfaction
momentously happen with certain components of aesthetic experience for

4
For a general introduction to the ingredients of musical hooks, see Gary Burns, “A
Typology of Hooks in Popular Music,” Popular Music 6 (1987), pp. 1–20.
5
See Theodor W. Adorno, “On Popular Music” (with George Simpson) [1941], in Essays
on Music, ed. Richard Leppert (University of California Press, 2002), pp. 437–469, and
“The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” in Adorno and Max Horkheimer,
Dialectic of Enlightenment [1944], trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1972),
pp. 120–167. Theodore Gracyk provides a useful critique of Adorno’s view of popular music
in Rhythm and Noise. An Aesthetics of Rock (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), Chap. 6.
6
Sergei Eisenstein, “Montage of Attractions,” in The Film Sense, trans. Jay Leyda (New
York: Harcourt, Brace, 1947), pp. 230–231.
4 S. G. SMITH

certain subjects. A beat or refrain that was intended to hook you may fail
to do so; on the other hand, you may find an accidental effect
captivating.
You may find any element of an experience captivating continuingly and
deepeningly. I say this in the teeth of a prejudice in aesthetic theory against
the cheap immediate titillations of pop songs that will surely lose appeal
over time, or even arouse disgust.7 Well, it is true that there are some pop
hooks I once liked that I can no longer stand to listen to. But the more
telling phenomenon is how many I have come to love, and love
thoughtfully.
Despite the drawbacks of commercialized hook discourse, I propose to
make popular music our primary field of reference for exploring the pos-
sibilities of hook criticism and the aesthetics of hooks. It lends itself
supremely well to this kind of study as the experience of popular song is so
widely and enthusiastically shared and affords most people their most pal-
pable sense of an enactment of ideal living. At the same time, it furnishes
an infinity of prompts for hook discernment, as experience shows that a
listener can be captivated by any sort of acoustic or semantic event.
What might hook discernment involve? For me, on one occasion, my
grab-back at what grabbed me came out this way, under the rubric of
“Harmony as Event”:

To harmonize a melody is to give it a more specified resonance and a more struc-

turally interesting and serious path to move along—a decorum. But harmony
can also be an utterly contingent and individual event of companioning voices,
a rendezvous (be it tryst or fight), and a preeminent hook—as when John
Lennon joins Paul McCartney in an eventful harmony vocal on the third and
especially the fourth verse of The Beatles’ “Hey Jude” (1968).
The ostensible theme of “Hey Jude” is Jude’s desire to start a relationship
with a girl.“You have found her, now go and get her.” The message about rela-
tionships is clear in the text. But the song’s really meaningful substance lies in
its being sung, where there’s a junction of the singer with Jude, hovering by Jude
in solicitude, lending him strength by speaking of strength, companioning him.
That’s the deep harmony that counts.

7
“Our satisfaction in most popular art does not typically deepen and extend itself on suc-
cessive encounters but rather comes quickly, all at once, often fading away precipitously after
a certain point, when it does not actually turn into repugnance”—Jerrold Levinson, “Pleasure
and the Value of Works of Art,” in The Pleasures of Aesthetics (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1996) 11–24, p. 13.
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

And the harmony is enacted in the singing by John and Paul, whom we
know. Their voices together make the sound of a benchmark friendship. John has
come in with various touches earlier in the track but at the ripest moment,
fourth time around, slips into harness and sings the whole verse. He wraps
around Paul’s notes with close intervals, giving the lines a gentle spring.
Toward the end of the verse John and Paul’s partnership starts to fly apart
backstage, as it were, in obscure ejaculations, possibly even expletives, around
the 3:00 mark. But that drama is soon superseded by four minutes of people’s
chorus, the great na na na na.
And now for a bonus that comes with a deep harmony reading of “Hey
Jude.” There’s a mysterious line in the song that Paul would have changed but
the poetically more open-minded John made him keep: “The movement you need
is on your shoulder.” A harmony, or a friendship, is an enabling hook-up and a
fulcrum in power transmission, a harmos, in Greek a shoulder. Paul’s encour-
agement of Jude (originally “Jules,” John’s son Julian) is a shoulder; Paul’s
implicit address of John is a shoulder; John’s hanging in with Paul (while he’s
leaving Paul, in a sense, for Yoko Ono) is a shoulder.8 The song is a shoulder for
all; indeed, no harmony keeps its resonance just to itself.

What have I done? It remains to be seen whether I’ve begun to shed

light on larger topics or have shared pleasure or insight with anyone else,
but immediately I’ve discovered a satisfying interpretation of a song I love
by creating an intellectual figure congruent with an emotional and even
kinesthetic experience of one of the song’s moments—an experience that
had emerged for me as a high point in hearing the song. The images and
metaphors I used seemed essential for following the extending and thick-
ening of the hook’s impact on me. I don’t know how my interpretation
might interact with other interpretations. Undoubtedly, I have more to
learn about the powers of the song and its devices, and also about my own
capacities for being gotten to and my intentions for using those capacities.
But I’ve made a start. I hope I’ve made a good enough start to hook you.
Writing an appreciation centered on one small part of one song proves
that the opportunities for hook analysis must be infinite, but now the
higher-order questions arise of what inclusive patterns or structures hooks

8
On the lore of what went into the song, see William J. Dowlding, Beatlesongs (New York:
Simon & Schuster, 1989), pp. 203–206. Compare how Paul comes in on harmony vocals in “The
Ballad of John and Yoko” (1969) after John and Yoko were married. For an interesting cross-­
genre comparison, listen to how George Jones and Tammy Wynette harmonize with beautiful
restraint on their hit “Golden Ring” in a performance two years after their divorce (https://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9KniULwvjE).
6 S. G. SMITH

and hooks criticism will exhibit, and how hook experiences fit into what
aesthetes and philosophers call aesthetic experience. Are hooks just the
“attractions” from which art works are made, relatively intense doses of
standard kinds of aesthetic gratification, or are they, more like people we
know, unique monads in their aesthetic universe? Are the analytical and
metaphorical gambits of hook criticism constrained by objective character-
istics of the hook or are they freely generated posits that come to the hook
a-wooing? I will have to work through a range of hook encounters and
gambits of hook criticism to show what would go into answering such
questions.
The present inquiry is designed to bring some helpful conceptual order
to hook experience and to show how an illuminating aesthetics can be
generated by putting hooks in the foreground. We’ll find that an orienta-
tion to hooks leads our attention not only to good focus points in pop
music but also to analogous focus points in other art forms, so that con-
nections are woven between pop music aesthetics and the larger conversa-
tion about all art forms and vivid experiences.
I plan to check in frequently with my own earlier-written “grab-backs,”
continuing to set them apart in italics, to show how grabbing actually hap-
pens in both directions—how my sensitivities are engaged and how I’m
able to articulate my enlivenment and try to share it in the jeux d’esprit of
hooky hook reviews. I ask all my readers to join this game.
 CHAPTER 2

Some Relevant Aesthetic Principles

Even if we don’t find all our hooks in the same places, hooks are interest-
ing and important to us—the “us” for whom this is true. That’s the hook
phenomenon. What general expectations for aesthetic experience best fit
with our shared love of hooks and our interest in elucidating them? I shall
put forward three general principles that I think revealingly amplify the
meaning of hook experience and get confirmed by it:

1. Special liveliness—aesthetic experience increases the ideally desir-

able, “high” and cherishable quality of life; I live more vibrantly, and
am impressed and grateful that I do so, when I am grabbed in great
aesthetic moments.
2. Usable models—aesthetic experience is well-formed so that it pro-
vides usable models of highly desirable living; the telling moves in
great love songs, for example, enable me to express and comport
myself in definite repeatable ways, and anticipate definite responses,
in the aesthetic experience of ideal loving (which could be helpful in
real loving).
3. Ringing realizations—aesthetic experience delivers perceptions that
are resonantly convincing, fatefully defining one’s position in that
staging of higher life.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 7

Switzerland AG 2023
S. G. Smith, The Special Liveliness of Hooks in Popular Music and
Beyond, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23976-2_2
8 S. G. SMITH

Special Liveliness
Whether or not by the artist’s design, a hook, like Lindsey Buckingham’s
guitar lick at 2:38 in “You Make Loving Fun” (Fleetwood Mac, 1977), is
a high point in my experience of a work; the work, in turn, is probably a
high point in my listening or viewing or reading life; and my good experi-
ences of artworks and art-like situations all share in a high value. What is
this “height,” presumably different from the height of moral excellence or
moral authority? There may not be one answer. I plan to invoke fuller
personal enlivenment as the best general conception of aesthetically high
life. But perhaps, as many think, the high value of aesthetic experience
generally lies just in the highly desirable distinctive pleasure it gives—an
enduring pleasure that seems to rise above more ephemeral or conflicted
pleasures—while hooks and favorite works rise up high because they
sharply focus for us some of the ingredients of aesthetic pleasure.
The trouble with citing pleasure as a principle of aesthetic value is that
it stops our conversation too soon, shedding no light. You say you enjoyed
the play? Or that it was delightful? That’s good, but clearly if anything is
worth probing and contemplating in our experience of the play, it lies on
the other side of that fact of pleasure, in the why and how of it. At least we
take a step in that direction by differentiating “high” pleasures from ordi-
nary ones; we challenge ourselves to make sense of that discrimination and
that aspiration.
Anyone worried about cultural elitism might want to reject the whole
idea of “high” pleasure. Mightn’t we value aesthetic pleasure simply as a
distinct extra kind of pleasure, recognizing that we would be poorer with-
out it, just as we would be poorer without many other desirable compo-
nents of our lives? Perhaps we enshrine artworks or celebrate “natural
beauty” simply for the sake of protecting and promoting certain pleasures
that we otherwise might miss out on. No aspiration need be involved
other than wanting to have the most good things in one’s life. And so the
aesthetic enjoyer need not pretend to any personal or cultural superiority.
The sense of a distinct “exhilarating” quality in aesthetic pleasure could
be interpreted as a highness.1 To be exhilarated is be cheered (hilaris); to
be cheered is to be encouraged, boosted in making one’s best way. But
making one’s best way needn’t involve going “higher” in any sense other
than the mounding up of the most good things. Perhaps we should be

1
Susanne Langer, Feeling and Form (New York: Scribners, 1953), p. 395.
 2 SOME RELEVANT AESTHETIC PRINCIPLES 9

careful not to overrate great pleasures: after all, from certain serious per-
spectives the good things of aesthetic experience are relatively “low”
because they make no practical difference in life.
There is a lot wrong with pleasure as the category in which to look for
aesthetic value. Part of the problem is that pleasure only gets to be high by
being more—or, for the sake of a more, simply being different.2 True, we
also tend to value so-called rare pleasures highly, but so what if a pleasure
is rare? Is it just that it is less likely to grow stale? Or is the point that one
should seize the rare opportunity to add that pleasure to one’s portfolio,
filling that lacuna? But so what if one has a filled-out portfolio?
We tend to ascribe higher value to so-called distinct pleasures, meaning
by “distinct” something more than “relatively more” or “different,” as in:
“It’s a distinct pleasure to welcome tonight’s speaker.” In that case, our
appreciation noticeably swings from the generic pleasure aspect to the
pleasure-causing individual. The accompanying pleasure confirms but
does not constitute the value of what occasions it.3 The significance lies
beyond the fact of pleasure.
It’s a mark of the highness of aesthetic experience that normally we’re
more interested in the distinct identities and actions of the objects of aes-
thetic pleasure than in the pleasure as such. The typical framework of aes-
thetic value is not a quest for a kind of pleasure, like my own daily quest
for various forms of good food and drink, but the particular relationship
we find we can have with a Beatles chorus or a Shakespearean speech. It is
more like having a friend, or an awe-inspiring leader, than having a great

2
In Jeremy Bentham’s hedonism, aesthetic pleasure could earn a high ranking only by
offering us a greater intensity or endurance or accessibility of pleasure—An Introduction to
the Principles of Morals and Legislation [1789], Chap. 4. John Stuart Mill tried to improve
on Bentham’s crudely quantitative utilitarianism with a recognition of the qualitative superi-
ority of some kinds of pleasure over others. To stay true to his empiricism, Mill had to rest
the qualitative superiority of X to Y on the (posited) empirical fact that the most fully expe-
rienced subjects, those best capable of comparison, prefer X to Y. But he also invoked the
important normative premise that a higher, more valuable experience is associated with a
fuller exercise of human capabilities. Mill, Utilitarianism, in Utilitarianism and Other
Writings, ed. Mary Warnock (New York: New American Library, 1974), pp. 258–260. Mill’s
approach is continued by the more recent aesthetic hedonists who require cognitive discern-
ment for aesthetic pleasure—see James Shelley, “The Concept of the Aesthetic,” in Edward
N. Zalta, ed., The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2022 Edition), https://plato.
stanford.edu/archives/spr2022/entries/aesthetic-concept/.
3
Admittedly, the “pleasure-causing individual” could be an interesting form of pleasure
rather than an entity—say, the arc of sexual climax.
10 S. G. SMITH

cup of coffee. I was already pointing in this direction when I used the
phrase “specially impressive.” As social beings we’re oriented to valuing
particular relationships to which we are committed, and the qualifier “spe-
cial” marks the high importance of our relationship partner and our delib-
erate act of entering this relationship and our loyalty to it.
For human beings, the foremost paradigm of “special” value—that
which is intrinsically, eminently worthy of being chosen, given attention,
and defended—is the individual person, indeed any person one encoun-
ters. The reason is clear: apart from unfortunate momentary crises of self-­
preservation, nothing else can match the importance for us of mutual
personal affirmation as we grapple with the infinitely interesting difficul-
ties in trying interdependently to be successes as persons. We’re obliged to
pay special attention to our fellow persons because we’re embroiled in a
historically concrete sharing of existence with them, each of us fated to live
better or worse lives according to the quality of our relationships. While
having the Beatles or Shakespeare in one’s life is not fully equivalent to
having a person in one’s life, the aesthetic relationship deserves to be
thought of as at least quasi-personal because of its analogous specialness.4
There, too, unique stimuli determine not just the pleasantness or exciting-
ness of life but its personal quality.
Yet another main problem with pleasure as the general category for
aesthetic value is that it is too passive. Pleasure happens to you, and within
you; it isn’t participatory, unless there is a sense of participation in pursu-
ing a continuing pleasure or in being at peace with something.5 Dancing
is a particularly clear counterexample to the supposed rule of pleasure. You
may think of dancing as a pleasure (if you do take pleasure in it), but more
naturally you think of it as enlivening fun. The emphasis is on what you
get to do and participate in, going out into shared life, rather than on what
you feel, taking something for your private reality. I venture to generalize

4
For Jerrold Levinson’s conception of “persona,” roughly corresponding to my concep-
tion of “quasi-person,” see his “Musical Expressiveness,” in The Pleasures of Aesthetics
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996) 90–125, p. 107.
5
Sharpening the hedonic aspect of the oft-made point that aesthetic experience involves
active engagement with its object, Mohan Matthen conceives aesthetic pleasure as a kind of
“facilitation pleasure” in contrast with the passive “restoration-or-relief pleasure” more usu-
ally assumed in discussions of pleasure. It is the difference between actively savoring some-
thing you’re eating and simply being relieved of hunger. “The Pleasure of Art,” Australasian
Philosophical Review 1 (2017), pp. 6–28. Facilitation pleasure is indeed a stronger way of
pleasure chiming in with enlivenment, but it is not the same thing as enlivenment.
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