ABSTRACT
Richard Sennett contrasts how a death might be recounted in a society with a fully operative distinction between public and private comportment versus one where this distinction has collapsed, as in Western culture today. Sennett's categories emerge clearly: authenticity, genuineness, and moral intimacy as the basis for interpersonal interaction, in contrast to the vocabulary of carefully engineered social artifice. One is a discourse of spontaneous expression, the other tapers codes of expression to context and social purpose. For Sennett, much Western political culture today, with its privileging of image over substance, merely reflects a flooding of the public sphere by the waters of private emotion and narcissism - often calculated, to be sure, but constructed to give the impression of projecting the "real" person. Sennett perhaps overstates his case to make a point, creating an overly deep rift between these two perspectives on culture. Modernist aesthetics offers alternatives and music may be said to "express" Ravel's temperament in other ways.
