Music After All

Music After All Author(s): James Currie Source: Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 62, No.
1 (Spring 2009), pp. 145203 Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the American Musicological Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/jams.2009.62.1.145 . Accessed: 03/12/2013 17:45
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Music After All

JAMES CURRIE
For Andrea Spain, who says yes (and so no)
Part 1: Work
Context
once received a sales letter and promotional materials for a music history text book from the Executive Marketing Manager of the Thomas Schirmer publishing company. This in itself is not very astounding. After all, it is a mundane enough experience for musicologists to nd such tediously shiny things in their mailboxes at the beginning of a long day of teaching. What is perhaps a little shocking, however, is that I read it. It informed me: Music is the expression of people living at a particular time and in a particular place, and this cultural context is vital to an understanding of music history. The great music of the Western classical tradition was written by real men and women, often during tumultuous times. Cultural context, therefore, is vital to an understanding of this music and its history. I was curious here about how a tautology could be passed off as an argument: a rst sentence, rhetorically structured as an assertion, followed by two sentences structured as a logical proof, the only addition justifying the specious logic of the progression being the strange detail that these real people
Many people helped with this essay. Andrea Spain and David Banash argued, laughed, and cycled their way through nearly every one of its turns during the long idyll of the summer in which it was rst drafted. Richard Leppert, a ne friend and mentor, carefully read the rst version, encouraged, and offered sound advice regarding the acknowledgement of those who came before. The composer Robert Phillips, friend and inspiration, read iek with me in a series of hysterically productive meetings over the course of many months. And the ve readers at the journal generously and patiently lead me to the understanding that while it is ne for an article to have sharp teeth, it also needs to be house-trained. Finally, my former partner, now long gone, Carlos Arvalo-Gmez (19582003); he was the shade, in the long farewell of whose cool quiet shadow I wrote.
Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 62, Number 1, pp. 145204, ISSN 0003-0139, electronic ISSN 1547-3848. 2009 by the American Musicological Society. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Presss Rights and Permissions website, www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/jams.2009.62.1.145.
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were writing music often during tumultuous times. These tumultuous times seemed to me to have the status of a vaguely dened tourist attraction hanging around in the background of the sentences panoramic aspirations; a danger that ultimately would not threaten me, but whose reality would guarantee that the day excursion I was signing up for was not a decadent distraction but a possibility to encounter the real itself. As with a tourist brochure, the prize I was being offered was myself, the reality of the encounter mirroring my own: the starry skies above and the moral law within. I was being offered the chance of becoming as real as those real men and women; I would take the risk, for I knew it to be vital to an understanding of this music and its history; studying music is relevant and context shows us how. Yet all that I had encountered was a rather thuggish piece of sophistry. The words tumultuous times added very little, merely functioning to turn up the volume on what was being repeated. If I had risen animated to my feet at the second playing, it would merely have been as a result of the increased magnitude of the utterance, not argumentative logic. Context, one might say, has force. However, force itself is beyond good and evil, indifferent as the wind. Which means that the vibrant health of musicologys contextual economy may not necessarily denote value. After all, economies can be inanely tautological, circulating things simply because at a strategic moment the things can be made to circulate successfully; formalist, since the contents of things are subsidiary to the autonomous self-reference of this movement. Musicology in later modernity resonates with such concerns as knowledge itself is increasingly commodied. And indeed, the kinds of redundant justications characteristic of the way we are made to reduce college curricula or our own research to the marketable stuff of economic exchange has been the subject of critique.1 But what of context? In these spectacularly disturbing times, we are bombarded on an almost daily basis with evidence of how we are caught in an increasingly tighter yet expanding web of relations and complicities: the inhuman conditions elsewhere in the world in which our clothes are manufactured; the appalling foreign policy decisions looming over the gas station; the vulnerability to political surveillance of the systems of communication we now have to employ, particularly in the academy with regard to e-mail; the censorship that can precede the music we might listen to; the pressures that infringe upon us in our minds as we consider our actions, scholarly and artistic, and possible dissents in an age of problematic legal transformations instigated by the Patriot Act, homeland securities, and the suspension of habeas corpus.2 Increasingly our homes,
1. For example, Kevin Korsyn, Decentering Music: A Critique of Contemporary Musical Research (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 2. Here, the disturbing case of Steve Kurtz can serve to illustratehe is a professor in the Department of Visual Studies at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York, and founding member of the internationally renowned Critical Arts Ensemble. In May 2004 the Joint Terrorism Task Force illegally detained Steve, who was working with legal biological materials for
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literal and metaphorical, are no longer a refuge outside of the world in which we liveif, in fact, they ever were. Robert Hullot-Kentor, for example, commenting on American life earlier in the last century, writes that whereas culture presupposed an autonomous individual . . . the contemporary American has been so overwhelmed by real and constant anxiety, has been so broken in on by heteronomous forces, that this autonomy and its capacity to breach subjectivitys own claustrum could no longer be presumed. He continues, the collapsed family no longer provides a buffer between society and person, which is part of why the American child is ooded with anxiety.3 So it is no surprise to nd J. Martin Daughtry writing the following in his introduction to Music in the Post-9/11 World, In tense and momentous times such as these, the place of music scholarship, or even its relevance, may seem less than clear to some.4 Faced with the certainty of uncertainty and the impotency to which it can give birth, there would, then, be a grandly negative, suicidal satisfaction in asserting that musicologys contextual practice is as stuck on the interconnected web of the worlds political and economic relations as anything else; a paralyzed y with the coal glint of a black star, ready to catch the attention of a spider . . . or a corporation . . . or a government that is almost indistinguishable from a corporation . . . or a state system undergoing nancial crisis and ready to snack on a music department . . . or any other gure that might haunt our imaginations, paranoid or not. Of course, One can proclaim the need for music scholarship in the post-9/11 world without harboring quixotic illusions of scholarships potential to save it.5 But it is difcult to whip up the same fervor, belief, and genuine excitement that in the 1990s characterized musicologys intense debates concerning its political responsibilities and the potential for them to be fullled. In retrospect, perhaps it was foolish, but there was a strongly optimistic quality to that time, fueled in part by the end of Eastern European communism; many intellectuals, most obviously Francis Fukuyama, neoconservativisms academic posterboy, believed that the forms of late capitalism could be easily reconciled with the furthering
an important educational show at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA), and confiscated materials that had already been displayed in major art institutions in Europe and North America. It was only in the summer of 2008 that the charges were eventually dropped. Full details of this case can be found on the Critical Art Ensemble Defense Fund website (www.caedefensefund.org). Broader concerns regarding academia, research, law, and censorship in the post-9/11 world can be found, among other places, in Homeland Securities, special edition, Radical History Review 93 (2005). 3. Robert Hullot-Kentor, Right Listening and a New Type of Human Being, in Things Beyond Resemblance: Collected Essays on Theodor W. Adorno (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 2045. 4. J. Martin Daughtry, Charting Courses through Terrors Wake: An Introduction, in, eds., Music in the Post-9/11 World, ed. Jonathan Ritter and J. Martin Daughtry (New York: Routledge, 2007), xxviii. 5. Ibid.
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of democratic cosmopolitanism.6 The tenor of our times, however, seems quite different, even though the prehistory of todays crises, in the United States at any rate, stretch back, for example, to the success of the New Right with the election of Richard Nixon in 1968, and the growth of economic neoliberalism in response to the 1973 oil crisis. Today the antagonism between capitalism and democracy (which in many ways is the other face of their present obscene complicities) is kept constantly in view just by the various sites, for example, in which the question of oil manifests itselfin the cautionary behavior of Europe when faced with the agrancy of Russias relationship to Georgia and South Ossetia, for example. Even Fukuyama has considerably modied his earlier stance. Optimism seems a much more desperate, shrill thing. However, even with all of this ringing in our ears, we should resist the temptation here to interpret the above-mentioned sales letter, for example, as an indication of contexts too smooth incorporation into, or even complicity with, todays negatively totalized world. After all, contextual practice in musicology is not just one thing. Contextual practice might accrue its force less from being able to run in political parallel to the worlds wrong, and more from the fact that its plurality makes it potentially exible and wily enough to adapt even to this difcult present. If we could accept for the moment that this is indeed the case, then musicology would still owe much gratitude to those who, in the late 1980s and 1990s and often under considerable duress, instigated the postmodern turn and worked to teach the discipline a language which it often now just speaks uently and without self-consciousness, as if it had always been its native tongue. As Alastair Williams succinctly puts it, The postmodern turn in musicology . . . means that musicology has become receptive to a general body of ideas, not that it is reducible to a particular theory.7 Even in famous indictments of earlier postmodern musicology we can encounter an acknowledgment, if admittedly in negative form, of the adaptive potential of its pluralism. Take, for example, Ko Agawus well-known unmasking of the analytic conservativism on which, he rightly observed, the progressive card of the New Musicology sometimes rested. An essential part of the New Musicologys strategy is, as Agawu put it, to deny any stable, collective identity, to insist on the impossibility of anchoring the rst signifying relationship. Such denial is understandable in light of the different initiatives that are gradually coalescing into a new musicology. This addendum then follows: But could such denial also be a trick aimed at ensuring that new musicologists are always able to shift their identities in order to, as it were, remain
6. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1992). For an extended critique of Fukuyama, see Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York and London: Routledge, 1994). 7. Alastair Williams, Constructing Musicology (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2001), 115.
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on top?8 If the answer to this were yes (which would be somewhat unfair), and that what the New Musicology bequeathed unto us now was precisely this somewhat questionable slipperiness, then the New Musicology, inadvertently or not, nevertheless provided the tools for the possibility of musicology having a home in the early twenty-rst century. So we should be a little wary of the now oft-told, and somewhat tired, Adorno-ish joke that the New Musicology has gotten old. (And not only since there is something a little limited in the implication that once something can no longer clean the oors of our home, it should be put out on the street; as if the ability of something to work were its only valuean issue to which I return in the nal three sections of this essay: Unemployment, Dance, and Rest.) If by means of its intradisciplinary pluralization the postmodern turn in musicology, broadly conceived, provided musicology with a certain ability to protect itself in the more hostile environment of the twenty-rst century, it might also be noted that it preserved the possibility of contextual study itself. Gary Tomlinson importantly reminds us that in the 1980s when musicologists, himself included, started polemicizing about context, conceptions of the aims and uses of history were actually narrowing and growing less venturesome.9 Contextualism had been a traditional part of the historiography employed by Paul Henry Lang, Nino Pirotta, and Edward Lowinsky around the time of the Second World War. However, in the early 1970s, just after the Beethoven bicentennial and at the time of prevalent neopositivism in the humanities, scholars became prepossessed by the revelations to be found in organic music analysis, and high-tech source studies seemed to many to represent the best that a historical approach could offer the eld.10 Of course, having been reintroduced into musicological debate, the notion of context then became a site of contestation between postmodern musicologists themselves; perhaps most famously in the exchange between Tomlinson and Lawrence Kramer.11 But since this merely fertilized postmodern musicologys already self-dening plurality, in historical retrospect it was perhaps ultimately to musicologys advantage.
8. Ko Agawu, Analyzing Music under the New Musicological Regime, Journal of Musicology 15 (1997): 299. 9. Gary Tomlinson, Music and Historical Critique: Selected Essays (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007), xii. The key essay here was Tomlinsons own The Web of Culture: A Context for Musicology, 19th-Century Music 7 (1984): 35062, repr. in Music and Historical Critique, 113. 10. Tomlinson, Music and Historical Critique, xii. 11. These essays were published in a special issue of Current Musicology titled Approaches to the Discipline and edited by Edmund J. Goehring. See Lawrence Kramer, Music Criticism and the Postmodern Turn: In Contrary Motion with Gary Tomlinson; Tomlinson, Musical Pasts and Postmodern Musicologies: A Response to Lawrence Kramer; and idem, Tomlinson Responds, all in Current Musicology 53 (1993): 2535, 1824, and 3640, respectively. The Kramer article was reprinted in his Critical Musicology and the Responsibility of Response: Selected Essays (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006), 4555; the Tomlinson articles were reprinted in his Music and Historical Critique, 95106.
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Musicology has continued to consider numerous traditional sites as it constructs its contexts for music: for example, concert life, publication history, music journalism, and general circulation issues; developments in technologies of instruments and recording; broader issues regarding historical epoch, nation, genre development, and stylistic history. But one of the noticeable features of the past two decades of musicology has been an increased questioning of condent assertions regarding the self-evidence of what constitutes a proper context for music. Primarily, this has arisen as musicologists have expanded their reading out into areas of the New Historicism, cultural studies, anthropology, and the work of Michel Foucault, to name but the more prominent inuences. Seminal earlier studies here would include, for example, Richard Lepperts work linking music to questions of domesticity, imperialism, the history of the body, and visual representation and Tomlinsons examination of the relationships between music and magic in the Renaissance.12 What one nds in these works is something that is now much more widespread and so less polemical in musicology; an investigation of musics cultural inscriptions from a perspective that is, at rst, seemingly ancillary. Leppert looks at paintings on actual instruments; Tomlinson looks at magic treatises. More recently, Mary Davis has refracted modernism through the prism of fashion; Emmanuele Senici has revisited Italian opera in the nineteenth century by means of the gure of the Alpine virgin; David Yearsely brings Bachs contrapuntal practice into conversation with, amongst other things, alchemy and the mideighteenth-century craze for automata; Annette Richards reads treatises on landscape and gardening and, in so doing, surprisingly reconceives assumptions concerning instrumental music in the late eighteenth centuryand these to mention only some of the examples that have come my own way and inspired me.13 If contextual sites have themselves undergone a kind of postmodern pluralization, it is also the case that the theoretical understanding of context has multiplied what is available. For example, coming from a position initially informed strongly by anthropology (notably the work of Clifford Geertz), and later by Foucault, Tomlinsons understanding of context is as a web constructed post factum by the musicologist in which the music can be located through an ultimately open-ended process of negotiation and renegotiation,
12. Richard Leppert, The Sight of Sound: Music, Representation, and the History of the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); and idem, Music and Image: Domesticity, Ideology, and Socio-Cultural Formation in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Gary Tomlinson, Music in Renaissance Magic: Toward a Historiography of Others (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). 13. Mary E. Davis, Classic Chic: Music, Fashion, and Modernism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); Emmanuele Senici, Landscape and Gender in Italian Opera: The Alpine Virgin from Bellini to Puccini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); David Yearsly, Bach and the Meanings of Counterpoint (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), Annette Richards, The Free Fantasia and the Musical Picturesque (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
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which for Tomlinson has strongly ethical implications. Here context is not a separate entity that, as it were, causes or determines music; It stresses a relationship of part to whole rather than one of antecedent to consequent.14 Thus, this position strongly de-emphasizes the status of music as an object that can be distinguished from the context by which it is mediated; this is the issue in Tomlinsons work that comes to a head in the exchange with Kramer. By comparison, Kramer is more prepared to admit a kind of provisional status for music as object, even though his concern has always been with musical meaning and, therefore, not with musical objects per se. Primarily what this allows for is the question of musics agency, which although far from absent in Tomlinsons writings does not have the same kind of visibility as it does in Kramers work. If we remember that context has its etymological roots in the Latin contexere (to weave together), then one way of distinguishing Tomlinson from Kramer would be according to the question of who in each instance is the weaver. In the former, context is being knitted by the scholar for a historical body that will never wear it (since it is quite literally absent, past) and for which it would never t; context is an essay, an attempt (as in the French verb essayer, noun essai ), or something of which we are in search of (as in the German Versuch). In Kramer, the residual object status of the music allows music to stand as one of the sources that can weave context itself into being, even though it itself is contextually embedded. There is a certain proximity here to the paradox of the serpent eating its own tail, with the notable difference that now the serpent is birthing itself head rst out of its own mouth; this is one of the ways in which the hermeneutic tradition, which is important to both scholars, manifests itself in Kramers work. [M]usic, as a cultural activity, must be acknowledged to help produce the discourses and representations of which it is also the product, he writes in an earlier book.15 In a later work he talks of a non-reductionist contextualism, of a critical practice meant to afliate music richly with things beyond itself without either allowing it to fade into a mere echo of those things or succumbing to the illusion that it has any genuine identity apart from them.16 Against a more commonsensical notion of context as that which determines music, what is attractive here is the notion of what manifests itself in the world only as a result of music. Kramers work in this instance, thus, resonates with certain statements in popular music studies; for example, Simon Friths opinion that rock music is less a representation of sexuality, than a source that creates a certain kind of sexuality that would not exist without the music.17 Such positions, as well as Tomlinsons, resist what
14. Tomlinson, Web of Culture, 356; idem, Music and Historical Critique, 7. 15. Lawrence Kramer, Music as Cultural Practice, 18001900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 17. 16. Lawrence Kramer, Musical Meaning: Toward a Critical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 6. 17. Simon Frith, Afterthoughts, in On Record: Rock, Pop, and the Written Word, ed. Frith and Andrew Goodwin (London: Routledge, 1990), 421.
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Giles Hooper has referred to as an untenable reductionism produced through several strategies: through . . . reducing music to a mechanistic substrate of supervening material factors, through . . . reducing music to a blank reection of this or that social or historical circumstance, or through . . . reducing music to a blank screen onto which are projected the contingent circumstances of a particular subject or context of reception.18 Music theorists and analysts have also contributed considerably to the richness of dialogues regarding context. In a now-famous article, Agawu reveals a potential lack in contexta hole in the web, to reinvoke Tomlinsonby questioning whether a theoretical analysis of a piece of music requires historical validation. Agawu thus asserts the possibility of a certain autonomy to the musical object and analytic practice that cannot merely be recontextualized. Since when did theory need such conrmation? he asks.19 Likewise, Arnold Whittall, in the face of a potentially overly cultural musicology, questions those who might resist direct engagement with composer and composition. He also accentuates a potential lack in context, but through a somewhat political turn, asking that we keep in mind the possibility that works of art may be defences against the world as much as products of the world.20 The potentially negative in context is of course a recurring theme in Theodor Adornos consideration of the problem of heteronomy. Kevin Korsyn, in a consideration of Agawus piece, acknowledges the potential of musical autonomy but questions whether Agawus absolutism on this point is completely productive. For Korsyn, inuenced as he is by Derridean thinking, context and text (history and theory, world and work, outside and inside) might be conceived more effectively less as antagonistic binaries than as uidly related in a kind of supplementary circularity. Through reference to the late Jacques Lacans employment of the Moebius strip, Korsyn writes that if you follow your theoretical impulse with absolute delity, you will discover historical contingencies as you encounter the culture that has framed the questions in advance by constituting you as a subject, and vice versa.21 But what of the actual political ideas that accompany these various contexts as musicology circulates them in all the sites in which its activities occur; in conference papers, public responses written and spoken, degree defenses, preconcert talks, journalism, and at the seminar table and in the classroom; to our students, undergraduate and graduate, young adults and those in continuing education, blue collar and middle class; in Ivy League schools, state institutions, liberal arts colleges, and music conservatories; to the wealthy, white,
18. Giles Hooper, The Discourse of Musicology (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006), 86. 19. Ko Agawu, Does Music Theory Need Musicology? Current Musicology 53 (1993): 92. 20. Arnold Whittall, Autonomy/Heteronomy: The Contexts of Musicology, in Cook and Everist, Rethinking Music, 100. 21. Korsyn, Decentering Music, 88. See also idem, Beyond Privileged Contexts: Intertextuality, Inuence, and Dialogue, in Cook and Everist, Rethinking Music, 5572.
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and comfortable, and sometimes to the enormous percentage of those who are not? Are these political ideals as pluralized as our contextual methodologies and theorizations? And if so, do they therefore hold the same potential for not getting fully caught out on the complicities and dangers of todays dark web? Can they perhaps resist or even transform? Of course, it is easy to shy away from these questions, and to think that musicology is not directly relevant in such a way. Even in the late 1990s, when political debates in musicology were, as I have said, strong, an effort had to be made in order to convince. For example, in a piece published in 1999, Ralph Locke wrote in reference to the AMS online graduate discussion group that The students often wonder whether research, and sometimes even the teaching of music history, is becoming a pointless self-indulgence (and/or a profession with shrinking economic viability).22 But although we might despair faced with the political question of how presently existing and increasingly totalized conditions might be transformed, the debates of the 1990s have made it almost impossible now to make a distinction between what we do with music and what we are doing politically. In 1993, it would have been difcult to read the following statement by Philip V. Bohlman without hearing an accompaniment of polemical percussion ringing stridently in the immediate background: Acts of keeping politics out of music . . . do not prevent musicology from being a political act. Quite the contrary, they assure that every apolitical agenda acquires an even greater political immediacy.23 In 2008, it presents itself to us more as normative than gauntlet. The following questions of Lockes are ones that we now all tend to ask ourselves automatically: How does our scholarly work carry out one or another social agenda, and how can we become more aware of our own agendas, and thereby sharpen the messages that we are (inevitably) doing our part to transmit and elaborate? What does a music scholar of whatever stripe . . . owe her or his fellow creatures?24 So just because musicology can seem broadly irrelevant, its political ideals nevertheless circulate in a not insignicant number of locations and to not completely homogenized social groups, and so its responsibilities (assuming we think they exist) are far from miniscule. If it is true, as Locke states, that the real world, like charity, begins at home, and at work, we might also keep in mind that the home for musicologys work sometimes has wheels and travels long distances.25 After all, nomadism, for better or worse, might well be the twenty-rst centurys new home and hearth. So what of these political ideas? Are they one or many? Are they of value or not?
22. Ralph P. Locke, Musicology and/as Social Concern: Imagining the Relevant Musicologist, in Cook and Everist, Rethinking Music, 499. 23. Philip V. Bohlman, Musicology as a Political Act, Journal of Musicology 11 (1993): 424. 24. Locke, Musicology and/as Social Concern, 501 and 502, respectively. 25. Ibid., 529.
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Ultimately, I argue that in comparison with the plurality of contextual methodologies, these political ideas (hereafter contextual politics) are much more homogenized. And this may not be a problematic opposition. After all, contextual politics could be dened broadly as a postmodern reformulation of basic democratic principles; it has as its potentially tautological goal the creation of a uid plurality of differences that are, nevertheless, unied around the project of allowing for the non-coercive coexistence of differences themselves. Within each difference, the repetition of the ever-transmogrifying whole is reinscribed. However, before moving on to the next section of this essay, where I will set about critiquing contextual politics, a number of clarications are necessary. For in talking about musicologys politics I am not always by denition referring to what political ideals are appropriate to the contexts in which the study of and discourse on music occurs. My initial maneuver will be to decontextualize partly the primary political positions from their functional employment within the musicological workplace and then to hurl them strategically into a thicket of questions regarding their effectivity beyond the parameters of the discipline. This, then, is not an essay primarily concerning what I would call the politics of musicology. The politics of musicology, I would argue, is what motivated the debates of the 1990s and their more recent restrained reruns. The questions it formulates have tended to be provoked from statements such as this: Musicologys crisis, therefore, confronts it also with a new responsibility to come face-to-face with the political nature of all acts of interpretation and with the political consequences of excluding for too long the musics of women, people of color, the disenfranchised, or Others we simply do not see and hear.26 And so the politics of musicology asks why are issues such as race, the body, gender, sexuality, and colonialism important for the study of music? Why is it that they have been kept out of the study of music, even though there is more than sufcient evidence to prove the connection? Why is it that people who study these issues are not getting employment? Why are there not more women and non-Caucasians employed within the eld? (As an aside, it is interesting to note that the issue of class has not often been so rmly forefronted in the politics of musicology, even though there exist key texts dealing with the issues in popular music studies and ethnomusicology.27) None of what I write in this essay implies that there have been no developments or ethical progress within the discipline as a result of such questions. Without doubt, the instigation of the postmodern turn in the politics of musicology has resulted in an astonishing deregulation of censorship regarding
26. Bohlman, Musicology as a Political Act, 436. 27. For example, Robert Walser, Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1993); Aaron Fox, Real Country: Music and Language in Working Class Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).
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what can be admitted to exist (now, or as an acknowledged citizen of history), and, therefore, what can now be allowed into the circulatory systems of the musicological economy itself. I am under no illusions: although some of the ideas of this essay may have been conceived without the existence of the present politics of musicology, you certainly would not have been reading an essay such as this in this particular journal without the precedent of their example. However, debates within the politics of musicology tend to come with the tacit assumption that what is appropriate for the politics of the discipline is appropriate for a political understanding of the world at large and, thus, that its political values are en route to praxis. In part, this is congruent with a basic assumption of contextual politics, which is that politics is primarily about locality; in Lockes formulation, charity begins at home, in musicology itself. I will be seeking to investigate the limitations of this position in the next sections of this essay. For the moment, however, the following should be considered. Even if we acknowledge that the structures of the global political crises now with us were functioning in the 1990s, our understanding of them then had none of the awful clarity that the rst decade of this harsh new century is imposing upon our consciousness. We are much more in the light with regard to how we shudder on the darkness of the web. And so if it is indeed the case that our political understanding of the world has undergone a certain transformation, then we need to ask whether the politics that has been of enormous benet to the health and vitality of the discipline, and which seems to have remained the majority position within it, is still one that can condently claim to make the leap into extradisciplinary existence. Should our politics not change too? Certain contemporary thinkers on whom I will be drawing extensively later have indeed been scathing about contextual politics, for example, the French philosopher Alain Badiou and the Slovenian, Lacanian cultural critic, Slavoj iekmarkedly left-wing thinkers whose vehement critiques of postmodern political, cultural, and ethical values mean that they have often shared the same stage, literally and metaphorically. Although my work has been deeply inuenced by them, I nevertheless do not assert that contextual politics is, in and of itself, wrong. Rather, I am concerned to ask whether it is strategically appropriate now. This is an important point to keep in mind during the sometimes harsh arguments to come, for I am working from the assumption that a proper understanding of the political value of ideas must resist the temptations presented by the paradox of historical essentialism. Political ideas are being understood in this argument more as pieces of equipment, and so that will on occasion lead me into a certain proximity to ideas that we have tended, because of their bad historical track record, to dismiss in contemporary musicological debates. Admittedly, it is true that political ideas, like pieces of equipment, can be imbued with the (sometimes negative) functions they have been envisioned, or appropriated, to perform; to cite a phrase of Martin Heidegger: Usefulness is the basic feature from which this entity regards us, that is,
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ashes at us and thereby is present and thus is this entity.28 However, the fact that ideas can be bruised by intentions and their difcult upbringing in their original contexts does not mean that they are merely the product of, or just fully determined by, acts of bruising. Hope, we might say, comes from the belief that humans, their ideas and tools, might not merely be reduced to the resultant mark made upon them by the intentions that initially brought them into being or appropriated them and so kept their sign in circulation. The fact that at historys darkest moments it has been possible to reduce things in this way is not proof of hopes unimportance but, rather, a reminder of its potential fragility, and the fragility of that which might enact transformation. What the human inevitably (and often inadvertently) passes on to the ideas that it creates is human potentiality itself: in other words, the reality that it can be in excess of its own determinations. An idea is not only bruised by the intentions that brought it into being; it also shimmers with, in Kants sense, freedom. A knife may be made for killing, but it is expressive of freedom through its ability to be appropriated for surgery and healing the sick. For example, although the assertion of Enlightenment modes of reason, justice, and autonomous subjectivity as universal categories provided an ideological foundation for the colonial drives of European nations, it is also the case that the appropriating of those very ideas by the victims of colonial domination in turn gave those political subjects powerful fuel in their own drive toward independence. The inherent ethical agency of an idea then is perhaps relatively small in comparison with the value and force that idea can accrue retroactively as a result of having been strategically appropriated. However, if this is cause for hope, it also opens up a landscape drenched in the light of a dark, if potentially laughing, sun. For if the force of an idea can be functionally re-coerced for the good, the opposite maneuver always follows in the wake, although rarely through a logic of purely symmetrical inversion. This potentially is as true for contextual politics as it is for anything else. The famous Monty Python sketch in which the Spanish Inquisition attempt to torture an old woman with a comfy chair and plump cushions captures well (too well) the dialectical complexities unleashed by this immanent and radical ambivalence in political ideas. The negative potential in the good cushion is not illustrated by the fact that it is now wielded by the hands of evil fanatics against the innocent. The hysterical brilliance of the scene lies in the trap it sets for us; to identify the old woman unambiguously as victim. But the old woman does not writhe in agony as the attempt is made to make the velveteen spike of the cushions corner pierce her side. Rather, the cushion inspires her to wiggle about excitedly within the comfortable context of the chair itself, as if she were enjoying a low-level transgression, naughty but nice. The attempted political act of the Inquisition changes very little, merely making the
28. Martin Heidegger, The Origin of the Work of Art, in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 28.
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old woman nestle down further into the pleasure of her already circumscribed life world. In psychoanalytic terms, it is not a political act, per se, but acting out; and as the groaningly pitiful depiction of the variously titled Judean Peoples Front in that funniest of lms, The Life of Brian, attests, this a leitmotif for Monty Python.29 From the shadows of the scene, the self-identied agents of political change, the Inquisition, are shown to have failed to have understood the precise nature of the cushions inscription within the world they are seeking to transform, and so they have been unable to wield it to transformative effect. The scenes darkest suggestion is that the Inquisitors have neither the real desire to change anything, nor the strength to admit what they are already enjoying. There may well indeed be an element of elitist, homosocial condescension in a bunch of male Oxbridge graduates in drag ridiculing the smug inanity of a female member of lower middle-class English society in the 1970s. But in a strange way the old womans failure to respond to the call of the political is not the ultimate crime. The offense lies instead with the Inquisitors and their scam of being able to validate themselves as politically engaged when they are just playing at fancy dress. And it is for this reason that the main aim of this essay is not the creation of a new set of political injunctions. In fact, I move toward suggesting that at this particular moment the preservation of a certain gap between musicological work and politics would be more productivethat we break the covenant that the last twenty years of the politics of musicology has sought to honor, and not because it was necessarily wrong. Rather, it is the purpose of the next section of this essay to raise some provisional questions regarding the potential effectiveness of some of the political positions that musicology circulates. Provoking these questions caters, I think, to a need, since debates about these positions have become somewhat stagnant, particularly in the disciplines more visible places of publication; by comparison, at ground level, in conversations with colleagues at conferences and the like, there are more restless currents, unseen from the surface. Politics Contextual politics is radically democratic in orientation, asserting that we should reject all absolute conceptualizations and universals, seeing them not only as instances of a failure to negotiate the challenge posed to us by the possibility of a demythologized world without making recourse to God-like substitutes, but also as a kind of sublime distraction from participation in more
29. On the psychoanalytic distinction between act and acting out see iek, Enjoy Your Symptom: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out, rev. ed. (New York and London: Routledge, 2001), chap. 2 (Why is Woman a Symptom of Man?), 3167; and idem, Violence: Six Sideways Reections (London: Prole Books, 2008), chap. 3 (Andante ma non troppo e molto cantabile: A Blood-Dimmed Tide is Loosed ), 6388.
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pragmatic projects that could tangibly alter peoples lives. To worry our politics with concerns regarding its universality is to avoid the important matters at hand, if not to infect it with the very source of such problems. We are primarily the product of particular times and places, perhaps even to the extent that, as Foucault was famously to state, man, as a humanistic concept that displaces God and the sovereign at the end of the eighteenth century, is an invention of a recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end . . . like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.30 So if the future might be ignorant of our trace, so too might the past, thus leading us either to see nothing when we look into its mirror, or, if we are good postmodernists and acknowledge a certain Nietzschean inheritance, to embrace joyously the fact that what we take for reections are probably rejections. As contextual politics tirelessly afrms, we have nothing to lose by removing the metaphysical, transcendental, and universalist scenery that has repeatedly been erected as the perspectival backdrop to our lives, and to think that we do is to exhibit a profound lack of faith in historically embedded human activity. As an act of human empowerment, then, we should work to contextualize ourselves more locally, since the local once all metaphysical depth has been attened out of itis a surface, in and of itself, profound. Charity begins at home. But how are we to coordinate this belief (that the world works according to disputes and resolutions within and between locally identiable contexts) with the fact that, as I have already stated, the economic and political reality of our present condition is more totalized than ever before and so not organized from the ground up, according to the needs and requirements of the local. We live in world where, to appropriate Terry Eagletons still-relevant comment, The capillary connections between economic crisis, national liberation struggle, the resurgence of proto-fascist ideologies, the tightening hold of the state, have never been quite so palpable.31 And thus, it is devastatingly ironic that at just this historical moment, when it is clear that what we confront is indeed in some sense a total system, and is sometimes recognized as such by its own rulers, that elements of the political left begin to speak of plurality, multiplicity . . . and the rest. Eagletons conclusion is that postmodernism is by no means a response to a system that has eased up, disarticulated, pluralized its operations, but to precisely the opposite: to a power-structure which, being in a sense more total than ever, is capable for the moment of disarming and demoralizing many of its antagonists. In this Marxist formulation, postmodernism is tantamount to a form of false consciousness. In a similar vein, Sumanth Gopinath has questioned Korsyns postructuralist assertion that in the postmodern condition of late capitalism we are no
30. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1973), 387. 31. Quotes in this paragraph are from Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 381.
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longer dealing with one central antagonism, but a plurality of antagonisms. Korsyn writes: Among the various movements for social justice today, involving race, class, gender, sexuality, ecology, and so on, there is no hierarchy that would allow one struggle to become the basis for the others.32 But as Gopinath comments:
If the degree and nature of present-day social antagonisms is varied and complex, there does seem to be a predominant motiviating force behind many (if not all) of these antagonisms: global neoliberal capitalism. Constituting an antagonism of antagonisms, as it were, global neoliberalismwhich is American neo-imperialism for some, and the domination of global nance capital for othersmight be understood as the frame that contains the present multiplicity of social antagonisms.33
If this is indeed the case, and global capitalism constitutes such a universal frame, then local level antagonisms are never merely local. Jacques Derrida has convincingly argued that the frame (or in his terms paragon) is never just decorative or simply territorial; rather it is constitutive of content itself (the work, ergon). Without the frame the content cannot support itself.34 Thus, local level antagonisms in their present form can exist only because of their constitutive relationship to their global frame; they are cut across by universality. Or in ieks words, the idea that today we no longer have a central struggle but a multitude of struggles is a fake one, because we should not forget that the ground for this multitude of struggles was created by modern global capitalism.35 Contextual politics, it would seem, needs to reconsider the notion of universalism. Otherwise, when it becomes euphoric over the notion of localized contexts and the differences that their articulation can liberate, it verges toward masking a despair regarding the enormous indifferent totality on which such particularities impotently slide. The possibility of a certain complicity between the politics of difference and an acontextual agenda masking historical issues was acknowledged early on in postmodern musicology, for example in Ruth Solies remarkably balanced introduction to Musicology and Difference: Strong theories of differenceespecially when essentialistare often
32. Korsyn, Decentering Music, 17. 33. Sumanth Gopinath, The Social Movement in the New Musicology and Marxist Music Studies, in Interdisciplinary Studies in Musicology 5, ed. Maciej Jabon ski and Michael L. Klein (Pozanan : Rhytmos, 2005), 8990. It should be noted that Korsyn is well aware of the problematic nature of the relationship between local particular and global capital. See, for example, his commentary in Decentering Music on Philip Bohlmans Musicology as a Political Act (16164). 34. What constitutes them as parerga is not simply their exteriority as surplus, it is the internal structural link which rivets them to the lack in the interior of the ergon [or work]. . . . Without this lack, the ergon would have no need of a parergon. [But] the ergons lack is the lack of a parergon. Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 5960. 35. Slavoj iek and Glyn Daly, Conversations with iek (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004), 14950.
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charged with the tendency to negate history, to hypostatize categories in such a way that change over time becomes invisible.36 Nevertheless, many in the academy have been tempted by the belief that difference is a kind of Trojan horse: a seemingly singular entity, which, once it has been allowed entry into the enemys compound, will unleash a vanquishing swarm of plurality. But perhaps a more cynical reading is appropriate. After all, within the endless ongoing crises of Modernity, the history of oppression is one of power (re)asserting itself with barely concealed indifference to the difference that contradicts itsuch as in the superciliousness of a once-elected/twice-serving government in the United States to expressions of mass dissent regarding the decision to wage a war deemed by many illegal. In many ways, we could argue that our desire to believe in the incendiary potential of the particularities of difference has already been preempted, and that we ourselves have become the object of our own joke, as if its punch line has, unbeknownst to us, already been circulated prior to our performance. (Either the audience is not laughing, or they are laughing at us.37) How, for example, do we interpret the fact that the undeniable powers that control commodity circulation allow for such a wide range of differences? Is it a political oversight that a strategic intervention might exploit for purposes of emancipatory destablization, or a cruel bit of irony, indicating a certain neutralization of differences force at this particular moment? What kinds of distinctions should we make between, for example, the dizzying array of choices exhibited by niche markets for musical recordings, and the endless parade of contexts for music that the major university publishing houses keep in circulation through their musicology series? As Marx said, when contemplating capitalism and the forces of modernity, our thinking must be doubled; or as literary critic and Marxist political thinker Fredric Jameson puts it, we need to think the cultural evolution of late capitalism dialectically, as catastrophe and progress all together.38 The pluralization of the commodity eld does indeed allow for the acknowledgment of some things that were previously ideologically marginalized. Take the increasing prevalence of gay men on television (in Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, for example).39 However, the systems that allow for the visibility of these acknowledgments are not completely transparent; they mediate as well as circulate. And so how do gay men appear on
36. Ruth A. Solie, Introduction: On Difference, in Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship, ed. Solie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 15. 37. I discuss this phenomenon in my review essay of Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid), Rhythm Science (Cambridge, MA, and London: Mediaworks/MIT Press, 2004): James Currie, Spookier than Spooky, Popular Music 26 (2007): 50512. 38. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 47. The classic study of this theme is Marshall Bermans All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Penguin Books, 1988). 39. I have discussed the question of the relationship between gay male politics and commodication elsewhere: James Currie, Musicology after IdentityFour Fragments, Women and Music 12 (2008), 8793.
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television? In Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, they play the role of commodities that tell us how to purchase other commodities. On the one hand we are back with the inane tautology of economies discussed in this essays initial statements; on the other hand, we are dealing with political castration. What has happened to the vehement political dissent of gay men in the 1980s? Where are the political objections to the still ongoing AIDS crisis (not one person cured! millions, gay and not, dead and dying, here and particularly in the subSaharan African continent!)? Scrubbed up, given copies of Fukuyama, and smilingly transported off to the suburbswhere, no doubt, they hope to shop in peacegay men, particularly if they are white, can now communicate the message that difference can be acknowledged without the world economy having to be disturbed. Of course, many might argue that the offense of having the stain of political dissent scrubbed from them has been counteracted by increasing legal securities. Perhaps. An example to the contrary, though: in 2005 the Bush administration quietly removed language that states that sexual orientation may not be used as a basis for a disqualifying factor in determining a persons eligibility for a [national] security clearance.40 And so it is potentially appropriate to suggest that the hypnotic effect of a sublimity of differences can keep us in a twilight oblivion to the fact that with regard to what matters there is really little choice at all, and that increasingly there is but one oppressively absolute context. We could elaborate further on these provocations by considering a negative theme regarding walls in our world: from the unending gated communities of suburban America through to repeatedly raised plans for a wall on the Mexican boarder, and perhaps even the incredibly controversial Israeli WestBank barrier. These walls seemingly mark the boundary line between one context and another and thus communicate difference (in these instances, as negative and problematic). Yet these walls often function not so much to protect from the threat of the Other as to protect from the terrifying claustrophobia of not being able to nd escape in anything other, since the people who threaten to leap over these walls are, in so many instances, those on whose exploitation the privileged wall builders worlds have been founded. Far from being invading barbarians, wall leapers in these instances are structurally internal, constitutive and determinative of the context from which they have been excluded, rather like horrifying manifestations of the Derridean supplement. Their attempt to get inside is, in effect, merely an attempt to become the content of which they are already the form. In todays world, then, these walls function as a fetish in the psychoanalytic sense: as an overdetermined object that disavows a fundamental lack elsewhere. They communicate the fact that increasingly there are only varying degrees of power within an overarching context, but no longer contexts per se.
40. See, for example, the Democracy Now headlines for 16 March 2006: http://www .democracynow.org/2006/3/16/headlines.
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Where might musicologys contextual politics be vulnerable to getting caught out in a similarly dead dialectic? Again, where is the prevalence of difference merely an articulation of the same? In discussing the difculties of both embodying generalism and ghting it at the same time, Williams asserts that postmodernism is a deeply divided condition, and its championing of diversity is as problematic as its unspoken generalism.41 Admittedly, postmodern musicologists have recently begun to acknowledge forms of this, but as a potential virtue rather than a problem. Recently, Tomlinson has spoken of an asymptote where human difference itself vanishes in the very commonality of our experience of it. He continues:
The approach to this place is not a methodological retreat from difference or from its importance in our thinking. Instead it conrms the inevitable truth that difference inhabits and haunts our experience. The asymptote marks the convergence where the encounter with others looms as the common origin and telos of human perceptionand the proper object of study of human sciences critical, ethnographic, and historical. Viewed from the vantage of the social fabric they embody, the countless expressive acts across the history of the species might well all turn out to be distillations and ritualizations of this shared experience of otherness near and far.42
Difference, in this formulation, is en route to becoming a universal fact of human existence. Even Badiou, a gure vastly different to Tomlinson, politically and in theoretical orientation, admits that difference is simply objective. As Badiou has written, Innite alterity is quite simply what there is. Any experience at all is the innite deployment of innite differences. Even the apparently reexive experience of myself is by no means the intuition of a unity but a labyrinth of differentiations.43 But the fact of somethings existence does not by necessity validate it as a productive political force. At the beginning of the next section of this essay I outline one possibility for where a certain openness to otherness might be politically productive to musicology as it negotiates the difculties of recontextualizing contextual politics in the early twenty-rst century. However, if we keep in mind Marxs injunction regarding the necessity of doubled thinking, then the following important point of Badious should also be considered: since differences are what there is [whether they are acknowledged or ideologically excluded], and since every truth is the coming-to-be of that which is not yet, so differences are then precisely what truths depose, or render insignicant.44 If differences simply are (Every modern conguration involves people from everywhere45), but if the world as it presently exists in
41. Williams, Constructing Musicology, 120. 42. Tomlinson, Music and Historical Critique, xvi. 43. Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (London and New York: Verso, 2001), 2526. 44. Ibid., 27. 45. Ibid.
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all its difference is fundamentally wrong(ed), then difference itself cannot by denition be a fully political category, since on some level in our increasingly overly linked world, it must be part of the problem. If this or that particular identity is put into play in the struggle against oppression, against the state, [the] problem is with the exact political meaning of the identity being promoted. In other words, Can this identity, in itself, function in a progressive fashionthat is, other than as a property invented by the oppressors themselves?46 Badiou does not deny the possibility that in certain situations a particularity might indeed become a political category.47 However, if a distinction cannot be made then in Badious terms it is not political, since politics for him is less the demand of a social fraction or community to be integrated into the existing order than something which touches on a transformation of that order as a whole.48 From a certain angle, then, to respect difference according to the normative terms of contextual politics is tantamount to asserting that there is no difference at allno difference from difference itself, and thus no possibility of something else than what is already in existence. In the extreme case, if we are drunk on difference it is because we can no longer bear to face the melancholy born out of our inability to hope or act. The injunction to focus on difference can bend the perspectives of musicological work on all sorts of levels. For example, in a recent article in this journal, Michael Long critiques the vocabulary of difference that informs even the very best modern writing on medieval music, noting how, to take but one example, in Daniel Leech-Wilkinsons work the remoteness of medieval musical life and its inaccessibility winds through his discussion as an understated yet determinedly pessimistic leitmotif.49 We might note the analogies between the political melancholy invoked at the end of my previous paragraph and the historiographic pessimism Long perceives in Leech-Wilkinson. Longs subtle and understated radicalism lies precisely in his decision to invoke a logic of the same, which in the context of my argument here sets up a completely unforeseeable (if admittedly productively tense) resonance between Longs delicately crafted historical enquiries and the seemingly diametrically opposed world of Badious hysteric political philosophy. Badiou loudly proclaims: The whole ethical predication based upon recognition of the other should be purely and simply abandoned. For the real questionand it is an extraordinarily difcult oneis much more that of recognizing the Same.50 Long quietly nishes a paragraph: The perception of difference serves, of course, as a magnet for interpretation; interpretation in turn often serves as a magnier of
46. Ibid., 107. 47. Ibid., 111. 48. Ibid., 109. 49. Michael Long, Singing Through the Looking Glass: Childs Play and Learning in Medieval Italy, this Journal 61 (2008): 254. 50. Badiou, Ethics, 25.
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alterity.51 In both cases, however, one of this essays leitmotifs is once more embedded within the texture of the statementsthe self-serving tautology of economies. For Badiou difference means the closing off of politics; for Long, difference means the closing off of historical enquiry. Longs hypothesis, that viewing trecento education from the perspective of more familiar and more recent pedagogies and pedagogues might prove a useful and illuminating strategy,52 is thus dialectically erudite, for the very logic of the same that contextual politics has often, and not always incorrectly, scripted as some kind of Western terrorizing of the object here returns as a productive difference. If an insistence upon accentuating difference can twist musicological enquiry, it is similarly problematic when it occurs in the political sphere. The logic of this political problem has been well articulated by the Argentine postMarxist political theorist Ernesto Laclau, whose earlier work, particularly the seminal Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, written in collaboration with the political theorist Chantal Mouffe, strongly inuenced ieks early work.53 As Laclau has written, I can defend the right of sexual, racial and national minorities in the name of particularism; but if particularism is the only valid principle, I have to also accept the rights of self-determination of all kinds of reactionary groups in antisocial practices. As a result, particularism must always be supplemented by a value: that the rights and boundaries of other contexts must be respected. As the demands of various groups will necessarily clash with each other, we have to appealshort of postulating some kind of preestablished harmonyto some more general principles in order to regulate such clashes. . . . There is no particularism which does not make appeal to such principles in the construction of its own identity.54 In order to be realized, the injunction of difference has therefore to presume a discursive space in which a process of reciprocal regulation is in action between lawthat which makes sure that differences are, universally, being respectedand the right to enjoy ones existence according to the culture to which one belongs. Since our world is increasingly interconnected to form a negative whole, this dream could work pragmatically only by universalizing the anti-universalizing position that calls for a respect for difference. However, since universalization for postmodern musicologists almost immediately implies colonial imposition and brutality, this must be founded on the (impossible) assumption that the peoples of the rest of the world have always been multicultural relativists. We assume a particular humanity as an underlying fundamental that expresses itself
51. Long, Singing Through the Looking Glass, 256. 52. Ibid., 253. 53. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London and New York: Verso, 1985). 54. Ernesto Laclau, Universalism, Particularism and the Question of Identity, in Emancipation(s) (London and New York: Verso, 1996), 26. I have also discussed this passage elsewhere: James Currie, Garden Disputes: Postmodern Beauty and the Sublime Neighbor (A Response to Judith Lochhead), Women and Music 12 (2008), 7586.
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socially and politically through dialogue and consensus-forming and so risk censoring the possibility of other productive ways of social and political existence. If we cannot assert this fundamental postmodern humanity as universally the case, respect for difference would have to be insisted upon from outside of the internal logic of certain cultures, an act that, in itself, would contradict the respect for difference through the very insistence on its implementation. In our present context, then, the limit of the respect for difference is the respect for difference itself. And there is a certain irony to this, since it echoes an ideological moment within the Enlightenmentin other words, it recalls the very discourse so many postmodern positions reject as a founding gesture of their own constitution. Contextual politics is haunted by anxieties as to whether there should be limits placed on the application of difference lest it undermine the ethical value of difference itself; the Enlightenment, of course, fretted likewise about reason.55 If, as contextual politics so often asserts, the ongoing horrors of Western colonial history result from theoretical universalizations stemming from the Enlightenment, then the universalization hidden within our anti-universalizing should at least make us pause for thought. What if multicultural relativism were in fact a symptom of Western liberalism that, as iek argues, results in the experience of the Other deprived of its otherness.56 Badiou, as ever, is prepared to take this to the edge of discomfort:
The self-declared apostles of ethics and of the right to difference are clearly horried by a vigorously sustained difference. For them, African customs are barbaric, Muslims are dreadful, the Chinese are totalitarian, and so on. As a matter of fact, this celebrated other is acceptable only if he is a good otherwhich is to say what, exactly, if not the same as us? Respect for differences, of course! But on condition that the different be parliamentary-democratic, pro free-market economics, in favour of freedom of opinion, feminism, the environment. . . . That is to say: I respect differences, but only, of course, in so far as that which differs also respects, just as I do, the said differences. Just as there can be no freedom for the enemies of freedom, so there can be no respect for those whose difference consists precisely in not respecting differences.57
He concludes: Become like me and I will respect your difference.58
55. See for example the responses of Moses Mendelssohn and Immanuel Kant to the famous essay question posed by the Berlinische Monatsschrift in 1783: What is Enlightenment? These and numerous other responses have been collected in Norbert Hinske, ed., Was ist Aufklrung? Beitrge aus der Berlinischen Monatsschrift, 2nd ed. (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1977); and in Ehrhard Bahr, ed., Was ist Aufklrung? Thesen und Denitionen (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1974). 56. Slavoj iek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates (London: Verso, 2002), 11. 57. Badiou, Ethics, 2425. (emphasis in original) 58. Ibid., 25.
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Taking this kind of perspective on board creates tangible repercussions for how we interpret the ways scholars study music, as is attested by Williamss questioning of the following assertions made by the ethnomusicologist Ellen Koskoff. Koskoff states that she wishes to use her knowledge and experience of music to promote tolerance of differencebetween races, ethnicities, classes, religions, sexualities and genders; moreover, she states that as an ethnomusicologist . . . I believe in the basic tenet of our eld: just as all people are inherently equal, so are their musics . . . that all musics (and people) are equivalent in terms of the values, meanings, and integrity of their own contexts.59 As Williams says, This belief, despite its worthy intentions, is surely dogged by contradictions, since it universalizes diversity and would presumably have to respect less egalitarian viewpoints. Williams then continues to examine one of Koskoff s examples, the kalawant, a hereditary vocal musician of North India:
Can her own beliefs about the contingency of knowledge be reconciled with traditions in which musical knowledge is considered to be far from contingent? Should she feel permitted to criticize the patrilineal privileges of the kalawant, or would this be to impose a Western view of rationality on another culture? Surely her dilemma is that while a broadly postmodernist critique of Western hegemony is indicative of a reexive capacity in that same culture, in moving out of that circle she encounters a process of canon formation that is not guaranteed to be compatible with her own (universal) notions of equality.60
The antinomy in which Koskoff s position gets caught is similar to that articulated above by Laclau in relation to particularism: in order to respect the difference of the Other, Koskoff can no longer respect the theoretical edice on which her own respect for difference is founded. Likewise, a theoretical deadlock is articulated in Martin Scherzingers important critique of ethnomusicological antiformalism. Scherzinger points out that contained within the context of Shona mbira is a respect for the autonomous musical moment that is analogous to the idea that music is a selfregulating process, endowed with a quasi-spiritual agencyi.e., Shona mbira shares strong similarities with the commonplaces of enchanted Romantic aesthetics and the idea of absolute music. Thus, in trying to respect and understand Shona mbira, antiformalist ethnomusicologists are confronted by something that is resonant with the very foundations of the formalism that they seek to reject from their own discourse; contained within the context they seek to illustrate lies the seed of an inadvertent rejection of the very notion of context as it is sometimes understood in the postmodern academy, i.e., as a fully determinating level of constitution for cultural products. Scherzinger:
59. Ellen Koskoff, What Do We Want to Teach When We Teach Music? One Apology, Two Short Trips, Three Ethical Dilemmas, and Eighty-Two Questions, in Cook and Everist, Rethinking Music, 546. 60. Williams, Constructing Musicology, 11011.
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Of course, there are profound differences between these traditions, but I am marking their afnities to dramatize the fact that it is not only Westerners who subscribe to notions of musical autonomy, high seriousness, and mystical transguration. Now, the radical ethnomusicological rejection of the romantic ideas that music is self-sufcient and inhabits a privileged social standing, in favor of an all-determining social context, is methodologically defeating in this conjuncture.61
Scherzinger argues that the question as to which approach will be of the greatest political benet for this music can only be decided strategically. This is to say, the antinomy can be exited only through consideration of specic constellations of demands, and not according to a priori judgments regarding the value of specic methodologies. If contextual politics threatens to universalize its anti-universalizing injunctions, its presence in musicology has repercussions not only for the relationship between musicology and the world at this present historical moment, but also between musicology and its primary object, the past. The following statement from Susan McClary, occurring as it does as the conclusion of a book, is an afrmative provocation and therefore fueled, on the one hand productively and admirably, by a certain overdetermination. On the other hand, it shows how being swept up in the rhetorical force of contextual politics can make that politics prone to being caught out on something much darker that is potentially immanent to it. McClary writes: Postmodernismwith its rejection of entrenched master narrativesdemands of us a far more diversied way of telling the history of music than we have previously permitted ourselves to entertain . . . a history of perpetual bricolage and fusions of hand-me-down codes and conventionsa history in which Western musicians have always been reveling in the rubble.62 There is a questionable paradox at work here: a diversied history will come from admitting that Western musicians have always been postmodernists; difference emerges here from a sublimity of the same, from the eradication of anything other than postmodernism itself. This veers toward neutralizing all the historical differences (the diversity) with regard to what contexts have constituted the already given, handed-down musical elements, and how they have been understood and come into being. More difcult, though, is the way it incapacitates a potentially founding cause of history itself: the Other that comes into being and creates the transformations that we can then document. (If there were never any such transformations we would never have history, only ever anthropology.)
61. Martin Scherzinger, Negotiating the Music-Theory/African-Music Nexus: A Political Critique of Ethnomusicological Anti-Formalism and a Strategic Analysis of the Harmonic Patterning of the Shona Mbira Song Nyamaropa, Perspectives of New Music 39 (2001): 31; see also idem, Music, Spirit Possession and the Copyright Law: Cross-Cultural Comparisons and Strategic Speculations, Yearbook for Traditional Music 31 (1999): 100125. 62. Susan McClary, Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 169.
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Even if we accept the debatable assertion that the music we make is only ever made out of what already exists, what we make from the disjecta membra involves the becoming of a new consideration of how those discarded parts might relate to other parts; the relations that had initially been fetishized according to the concept of the thing as it had been normatively recognized get negated, as Walter Benjamin and the Surrealists frequently remind us. For something to emerge out of the rubble requires an almost Kantian understanding of how, in the rst place, something can be understood as a thing, as having an identity that is in surplus of our perception of its status as merely the sum of its parts. Moreover, something logically must emerge from the rubble and support itself in the rst place, like a building, through its own form (that is, again, more than the sum of its parts), before it can fall down and become rubble available for the always-already postmodern musician of Western history. History relies on something that is not history, the becoming of the new; and yet the new is historys Other. For as Gilles Deleuze writes, Becoming isnt part of history.63 In this sense history isnt experimental, it is just the set of more or less negative preconditions that make it possible to experiment with something beyond history.64 Admittedly, without history the experimentation would remain indeterminate, lacking any initial conditions, but experimentation isnt historical.65 In effect, however, history amounts only to the set of preconditions . . . that one leaves behind in order to become, that is, to create something new.66 For the sake of clarity, it is worth repeating here something from this essays rst section: that what I say is not meant as a dismissal, tout court, of the important developments in musicology over the past two decades and more. Nothing is being denied. However, in the name of consistency neither are the denials that have themselves been birthed from the, as it were, inherent structural limitations of those earlier afrmations. And so to bring this section to conclusion, I would like to draw to the surface a paradox that only seems to be ancillary. Contextual politics afrms the locality of both what is and has been against censorious metaphysical myths of what is always and everywhere. But if contextual politics afrms temporal particularity, then why does it counteract that afrmation by trying to preserve the temporally particular in scholarly discourse, like a y in amber? A smart and pragmatically dialectical answer would be that in order to keep the antimetaphysical practice of particularity in circulation (to stop us from forgetting) that practice must strategically submit to
63. Gilles Deleuze, Control and Becoming, in Negotiations: 19721990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 171. In the not-too-distant background here is, of course, Friedrich Nietzsches Untimely Meditation, On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life, in Untimely Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazeale, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 59123. 64. Deleuze, Control and Becoming, 170. 65. Ibid. 66. Ibid., 171.
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negation within the inherently metaphysical tendencies of written discourse. However, deeply embedded within the metaphysical paradoxes of preserving the particular lies a sadder form of understanding, born from a fear of fading and of the impermanence of things. I invoke this now not so as to incorporate contextualization into a tropics of venerable existential themes, but rather to illuminate a moment of inadvertent understanding regarding present crises that lies hidden amidst the political delusions that elsewhere mar the relationship between contextual politics and its own context. For it is precisely in our present context that contexts are endlessly threatened with their dissolution, endlessly vulnerable as they are to the politico-economic totality on which, to return to an earlier metaphor, they might slide and skate, but more frequently through which they just fall into freezing black waters to fade without trace. As iek writes:
Capitalism is not just universal in itself, it is universal for itself, as the tremendous actual corrosive power which undermines all particular lifeworlds, cultures and traditions, cutting across them, catching them in its vortex. It is meaningless to ask Is this universality true or a mask of particular interests? This universality is directly actual as universality, as the negative force of mediating and destroying all particular content.67
Thus, we might say that the import of the notion of particularity has emerged precisely when and because it has become impossible. A relatively obvious example would be to compare the Broadway of the Upper West Side of Manhattan of fteen years ago with today. Whereas before it was a strange and sometimes funky salad of mostly privately owned business, it is now increasingly constituted, as a result of commercial deregulation, by a mantra of corporately organized franchises and stores that could be found in any mall in any part of the Northeast and that repeats itself every ten to twenty blocks: Banana Republic, Gap, Starbucks, Old Navy, McDonalds, Ann Taylor (Loft, Atelier, or anything elsetheme and variations technique, after all, is not an unknown trait in this musical style). If one has been walking from Columbia University at West 116th Street, by the time one gets to 42nd Street and Times Square one will have achieved what many practitioners of yoga spend years merely hoping for: the imsy ego will have dissolved into the one within, which will then open out onto the one without of which one is but one within. And so you will be completely congruent with where you nd yourself, for Times Square is now one. Even in the early 1990s, this area was still truly beyond good and evil; no mere commodied tourist attraction, but in the best, and therefore potentially volatile sense, a sexual, commercial, racial, legal, criminal, and class jungle where there was the possibility of an authentic encounter.68 It is now Disneyowned, surgically modied, and dressed.
67. iek, Violence, 132. 68. For a brilliant analysis of the negative effects of the clean up and gentrication of Times Square, see Samuel R. Delany, . . . Three, Two, One, Contact: Times Square Red, 1998, in
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However, although its crime demographic has changed, its crime rates have not; although it now only smiles, it is still dangerous. Far less inspiring of wit would be the numerous examples provided by the desperate sites of conict between indigenous peoples and governmentbacked corporations, primarily in third world countries, as for example in the ongoing complexities in the Niger basin delta of Nigeria. As an area incredibly rich in oil resources, drilling in this area could have provided funds for local resourcesan oft-dashed hope in Africa. However, not only do an average of 60 percent of the massive prots from this area go to the government, 40 percent to the oil companies (primarily Royal Dutch Shell, Chevron, and ExxonMobil), and absolutely nothing to the region itself (companies not even employing locals), but indifference to environmental issues means that shing ponds have become polluted, farm lands rendered useless, and the air completely toxied. As a result, indigenous peoples, such as the Ogoni, whose lands have been targeted for oil since the 1950s, have not beneted from the exploitation of resources on their own lands; moreover, their very existence has been put in jeopardy, and their attempts at protest and dissent squashed. The story of the Ogoni writer and activist Ken Saro Wiwa is a case in point. A spokesperson and then president of the Movement for the Survival of Ogoni People (MOSOP), he was arrested by the Nigerian Military in 1994 on charges of incitement to murder after heading a nonviolent campaign particularly against Shell. Found guilty in a trial that was widely criticized by human rights organizations, he was then executed by hanging in November of 1995.69 I invoke these examples not as punitively shocking news to berate us arrogantly out of our political indifference; anyone who has read a newspaper in the past ten years is aware of such things. Rather, it is to point out that a politics of difference, such as one nds in contextual politics, even if it takes account of local-level antagonism, reaches a limit with regard to its understanding of such now-common global phenomena. For the activism of the Ogoni is not merely one that takes place in the name of difference; in their world, that name is cut across by universality itself, as it is in Times Square and practically everywhere else. As iek points out, the universality of capitalism resides in the fact that capitalism is not a name for a civilization, for a specic culturalsymbolic world, but the name for a truly neutral economic-symbolic machine
Giving Ground: The Politics of Propinquity, ed. Joan Copjec and Michael Sorkin, 1985 (London and New York: Verso, 1999.) 69. For more information see J. Timothy Hunt, The Politics of Bones: Dr Owens Wiwa and the Struggle for Nigerias Oil (Toronto: McCelland and Stewart, 2005); Onookome Okome, Before I Am Hanged: Ken Saro-Wiwa, Literature, Politics, and Dissent (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2000); and the open letter of protest sent by the PEN America Center (New York City) and signed by Chinua Achebe, G. F. Michelsen, Ben Okri, Harold Pinter, Susan Sontag, Robert Stone, and Norman Rush, The Case of Ken Saro-Wiwa, New York Review of Books 42, no. 7 (20 April 1995).
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which operates with Asian values [for example] as well as others. And so critics of Eurocentrism who endeavor to unearth the secret European bias of capitalism fall short here: the problem with capitalism is not its secret Eurocentric bias, but the fact that it really is universal, a neutral matrix of social relations.70 In part, contextual politics understands the endless threat to the survival of the particular, but it is faced with alienation (its inability to think the totality of late capitalism of which it is part). For iek, this alienation is structurally necessary, a constitutive support of postmodern politics itself: Postmodern politics denitely has the great merit that it repoliticizes a series of domains previously considered apolitical or private: the fact remains, however, that it does not in fact repoliticize capitalism, because the very notion and form of the political within which it operates is grounded in the depoliticization of the economy.71 Whether we agree with this or not, the alienation itself makes contextual politics vulnerable to a kind of superstitious tautology in which the route toward preserving the particular, it is implied, will come from the passionate repetition of the mantra preserve the particular! But as this incantation reverberates in ever-increasing circles, it eventually makes contextual politics transform into the very form of theoretical universalization that was its original object of critique, and so masks the indifferent universal force of that which today destroys what the labor of contextual politics claims to work to preserve. And so it would seem that contextual politics must become history, not in the somewhat mean colloquial sense, that it must be superseded, but in the more positive Nietzschean sense, that it will inadvertently step beyond itself by somehow catching itself out, and so actualize something new into the musicological world. The somewhat odd question to which I turn in Part 2 is whether music might itself have any role to play in how this might happen. Or is it just music after all, merely our object of study?
Part 2: Play
Unemployment Narcissus tries to see the impossible (the ideal of himself as himself, in-and-ofhimself ) and so he dies. Because he is caught in this impossible desire, others (Echo) are encouraged only to repeat (echo) what he says, and ultimately to fade away. One of the implications of the Echo and Narcissus myth is that in order to become something else and stop the destruction of oneself and others, one needs to be distracted out of the tautological economy that supports
70. iek, Violence, 156. 71. Slavoj iek, Class Struggle or Postmodernism? Yes, please! in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, ed. Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and iek (London and New York: Verso, 2000), 98. (emphasis in original)
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the impossible idea of oneself that one can, nevertheless, never own. To a degree, many musicologists have concurred. Korsyn asserts that the route out of the particular discursive problematic he articulates is neither another theory of musical structure, nor more ethnographic eldwork, nor more historical criticismhowever valuable such things may be.72 Instead, what is required is an ethical transformation that will make us, in the words of Mark Bracher, more capable of accepting and nurturing otherness both in ourselves and in others.73 A similar kind of critical orientation has also, of course, long been part of Tomlinsons position. In his famous exchange with Kramer, for example, he argued that in our attempts to show the ways in which some of our most basic, apparently natural categories are local cultural constructs . . . crucial leverage might come from our exposure to more distant musical others than most of us usually encounter.74 By denition, any work that has been strongly inuenced by anthropological and certain hermeneutic models communicates how the encounter with the Other might productively transform a critics relationship to the givens of his or her own interpretive practices. So, for example, Timothy Rice, an ethnomusicologist who employs phenomenological hermeneutics, talks about his initial attempts to learn Bulgarian bagpipe performance as arising from various narcissistic appropriations. Not only was Rice motivated by a selsh desire to learn the tradition for myself, but also for the purposes of what it could do for me in the American world of scholarship and amateur performance of Balkan music.75 At rst, then, his engagement was mediated by the psychological and economic dynamics of personal property, and the acquisition of professional and cultural capital. However, what developed was a friendship with his teacher, Kostadin, a friendship that had been autonomous of Rices initial narcissistic economy but that ultimately transformed not only himself, but also his teacher. Kostadin in turn began to pressure me to appropriate the tradition completely, that is, to transform myself into a gaidar, for himself. My self-transformation had become meaningful and important to him and his self-denition and self-regard.76 If transformation involves negating the deadlock of a certain narcissistic structure, then when contextual politics looks into the pool perhaps it is in the distractions created by the rippling distortions cutting across its own reection
72. Korsyn, Decentering Music, 176. 73. Ibid. 74. Tomlinson, Musical Pasts and Postmodern Musicologies, 23, repr. in Tomlinson, Music and Historical Critique, 100. 75. Timothy Rice, Toward a Mediation of Field Methods and Field Experience in Ethnomusicology, in Shadows in the Field: New Perspectives for Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology, ed. Gregory Barz and Timothy Cooley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 116. In the passage preceding this, Rice has been discussing the phenomenologist Paul Ricouers ideas on the possibility of a nonnarcissitic appropriation. 76. Ibid.
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that it must be inextricably caught. The problem posed so far in this essay could, therefore, conclude as follows: contextual politics must practice what it appears to preach and open itself up to the other of the different political positions that, in both theory and praxis, exist in the world today (none of which implies necessarily accepting those positions). Ironically, the solution perhaps is that contextual politics should contextualize itself, performing the same careful and difcult work that should characterize any contextual understanding of music on the very political givens that often are internally interwoven within and also used from without to validate the broader relevance of the various contextual methodologies in circulation. As Williams precisely puts it: We can offer postmodernity some of its own medicine and ask it to reect on the specics of its own historical location, which for Williams would mean a proper consideration of where it is not in existence.77 On some level, such a project would necessitate a certain distancing from the pleasures and securities that come from identifying with contextual politics itselfa certain disinterestedness, to invoke Kant. Approached from the Left, some of the issues that this would need to negotiate might be a mortifying acknowledgment (once again) of our often uninterrogated use of the term democracy as a kind of absolute virtue whose structure and functioning we assume are so self-evident and uncontested that they require no further examination. This practice, which, in one of its typical maneuvers, often pits the self-evident good of democracy against the self-evident evil of variously identied totalitarianisms, on the one hand helps to mask the deeply problematic complicities of democracies over the past hundred years. Badiou talks of how those involved in such a maneuver wish, for example, to conceal the deep and secret bond between the political real of Nazism and what they proclaim to be the innocence of democracy, and thus asserts that there is a real problem to be located in the linkage between democracies and that which, after the fact, they designate as their Otherthe barbarism of which they are wholly innocent.78 On the other hand, this practice works to neutralize a certain excess within democracy itself and thus, some might argue, to delimit democracy into something it is not. For example, the French, post-Marxist philosopher Jacques Rancire has recently argued, that there is a tendency to want to make democracy into a kind of regime, a form of society, where the political, the sociological and the economic are conated. For Rancire this results in a drive toward overly certain and xed types of political agendas that ultimately give rise, in his interpretation, to a dominant sociology of narcissistic consumerism.79 Allied to this questioning of democracy would be an interrogation of whether, as iek has put it, capitalism really is the only
77. Williams, Constructing Musicology, 119. 78. Alain Badiou, The Century, trans. Alberto Toscano (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), 45. 79. Jacques Rancire, Hatred of Democracy, trans. Steve Corcoran (London: Verso, 2006), 22.
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game in town.80 The reconsideration of socialist politics and Marxist theory that is already in operation, particularly amongst the group of music scholars initially working out of the University of Alberta, would need to be more widely and critically taken on board.81 And nally, it seems deeply pressing that we evaluate again the virtues and pragmatics of the following notions, which are sometimes too easily dismissed in todays musicological circles as masks for some kind of phallic, and often Germanic, brutality: courage, bravery, emancipation, commitment, autonomy, idealism, utopia, belief, universalism, sublimity, and heroism (the latter which I invoke as a possibly ungendered potential).82 But if the solution to the problem of contextual politics in musicology is to be found in separating political ideas from musical studies per se and subjecting them to the thoroughly commendable, solid, and recognized scholarly practice of a full critical and historical examination, then the answer to the question of whether music might have any role to play in negating musicologys political problematic is no. And this would imply that perhaps music after all is simply our object of studya conclusion that sits uncomfortably with the already-discussed theory-praxis symbiosis often implied in musicologys self-validations. So while musicology is off doing something other than musi80. iek, Class Struggle or Postmodernism? 95. 81. A list of representative titles here could include Regula Burckhardt Qureshi, ed., Music and Marx: Ideas, Practice, Politics (New York: Routledge, 2002); Adam Krims, ed., Music/ Ideology: Resisting the Aesthetic (Amsterdam: G + B Arts International, 1998); and Henry Klumpenhouwer, Late Capitalism, Late Marxism, and the Study of Music, Music Analysis 20 (2001): 367405. The beginnings of a critique of the political limitations of some of this work can be found in Gopinath, The Social Movement in the New Musicology and Marxist Music Studies. 82. In the realms of political philosophy, Badiou has been particularly vocal in reasserting the import of these terms. See, for example, Ethics and Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003). The beginnings of a selective bibliography for music-orientated work that has considered the positive potential of some of these terms would include the following: the potential value of utopian thinking has been acknowledged by Williams in Constructing Musicology, 137, and has been a recurring theme in Simon Friths work, for example, Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), and recent work by Leppert, Music Pushed to the Edge of Existence (Adorno, Listening, and the Question of Hope), Cultural Critique 60 (2005): 92133; work acknowledging the critical and political import of the notion of the sublime is growing, for example, see Robert Fink, Beethoven Antihero: Sex, Violence, and the Aesthetics of Failure, or Listening to the Ninth Symphony as Postmodern Sublime, and Paul Attinello, Passion/ Mirrors (A Passion for the Violent Ineffable: Modernist Music and the Angel/In the Hall of Mirrors), both in Beyond Structural Listening? Postmodern Modes of Hearing, ed. Andrew DellAntonio, 10953 and 15472, respectively (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). Of critical interest would also be Adam Krims, The Hip-Hop Sublime as a Form of Commodication, in Music and Marx, ed. Regula Burckhardt Qureshi, 6378 (New York: Routledge, 2002); a key text in reevaluating the political potential of autonomy is Lydia Goehr, The Quest for Voice: On Music, Politics, and the Limits of Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
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cology, what in the meantime is music doing? The too circular and self-serving answer would be that it is doing what it always does, taking part in and being created out of its contexts. In other words, while musicology is busy not doing musicology in order that it might do musicology in a more politically effective manner, music is doing the very politicsassuming that we persist in the belief that musics contextual embeddedness constitutes politicsthat it has always been musicologys political responsibility to bring to light. But what if for a fanciful moment we were to imagine that at least some music does that work only when musicology itself is in attendance, and that once the curtain comes down on the scholarly paper, presentation, or article, Music then does nothing much of anything: scrapes the makeup off with a desultory hand, wondering, in world-weary fashion, if it is worth bothering to hang up the stage costume lying crumpled on the oor; waits without interest for the short-lived spectacle of the unemployment check as it nosedives from the glory of the postmans hand to the dust of the door mat; contentedly bored, ignorant, she smokes, the sublime activity of all unproductiveness.83 It is to the possibility of this kind of unemployed art that Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit addressed themselves in their well-known study of art and impoverishment, in which they argued against the notion that the role of art is to redeem, comfort, and improve us ethically, culturally, and politically, and proposed, rather, the import of an art that voids meaning, and dares to fail. In their discussions of Beckett and late Rothko, they showed how
It is as if each of them were saying to his reader or spectator: I have very little (perhaps nothing) to say to you, I have very little (perhaps nothing) to show you. To put this in another way: My work is without authority. You will learn nothing from it; you will gain no moral prot from it; it will not even enhance your life with that delight or superior pleasure which, you have been led to believe, artists have the obligation to provide you.84
But the idea that art might be capable of being out of a job raises a certain middle-class horror in many of us. Our culture, though paying little attention to art, is emphatic about its edifying value. Not only do great masterworks (especially those of western culture) have much to teach us; they are also expected to make us better individuals and better citizens.85 Of course, the implicit injunctions against wastefulness that accompany outrage at the possibility of arts indolence often function to articulate real concerns. For example, Kramer has argued that in todays world, those who have been left in charge have irresponsibly let classical music oat into stagnant waters, like a stick in a game whose interest has, for participants present and potential, long since waned:
83. On the last point, see Richard Klein, Cigarettes Are Sublime (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993). 84. Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Arts of Impoverishment: Beckett, Rothko, and Resnais (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 3. 85. Ibid.
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It barely registers in our schools, it has neither the prestige nor the popularity of literature and visual art, and it squanders its capacities for self-renewal by clinging to an exceptionally static core repertoire. Its audience is shrinking, graying, and overly palefaced, and the suspicion has been voiced abroad that its claim to occupy a sphere of autonomous artistic greatness is largely a means of veiling, and thus perpetuating, a narrow set of social interests.86
Accordingly, if classical music is to be brought back into the current of things, ways must be found of convincing others that it has meaning: concrete, complex, and historically situated, and, thus, that it can do cultural work.87 For the Kramer of Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge, one source from which we might construct such a successful rhetoric would be nineteenth-century models. Signicantly, Kramer admits that (1) these models included esoteric conceptions of music based on its apparent transcendence;88 (2) the triumph of the esoteric side in the twentieth century left the eld of discourse vulnerable to the appalling misappropriation of the great Germanic tradition by the Nazis; and (3) by the mid-twentieth century, classical music had passed out of the public sphere. Nevertheless, this esotericism coexisted and contended with semantic conceptions that imbued music with poetic, narrative, or philosophical meaning and with sociocultural agency. And so the aim should be to recapture, not the content of [this] earlier discourse, but the role of that discourse in society and culture. If that can be done, it can help revivify classical music by demystifying and deidealizing it: in short, by canceling the Faustian bargain that lofts the music beyond the contingencies, uncertainties, and malfeasances of life at the cost of utter irrelevance. A moral could be drawn from this: if music, like a political idea, is a tool, then better the unambiguous honesty that comes from smudging it with our own rough, instrumental hands than leaving it discarded as but the music itself. After all, perhaps music, like God, is only as good as we are, and so by not taking it in hand we either leave it vulnerable to interference from other hands or we mask the potential inhumanity of what our own hands are doing while our loving ears look longingly to song. The ultimate conclusion to be reached here would be the well-known one articulated by Tomlinson in his criticism of Kramers residual formalism: in essence, that there are only hands; or there is the conclusion sounded in Kramers critique of Tomlinson: that music in its immediacy cannot be distinguished from its contexts.89 For Tomlinson, the formalist remainder in Kramers work decontextualizes his contextualism; as
86. Lawrence Kramer, Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 34. Such themes continue to resonate in Kramers recent Why Classical Music Still Matters (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). 87. Kramer, Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge, 2. 88. Quotes in the rest of this paragraph from ibid., 45. 89. Kramer, Music Criticism and the Postmodern Turn, 27.
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a result, instead of postmodern doubt, play, and problematizing of the communicative relation, Kramer offers a too-familiar modernist mastery, and ultimately this wounds human reciprocity itself.90 Formalism is scripted here as a modernist specter spooking postmodern musicological discourse, like Gods continued hauntings after His death. It is the symptom of our failure to face up to the challenge of fully secular life, of life without the master whom because we lack the faith to live without beliefwe preserve in a suspended zombie state of living death. Rather than the idolatry created by love of the musical objectthe formalist fetishism that Henry Klumpenhouwer for example has subjected to Marxist critique91the primary stimulus for musicology . . . might more luminously be our love of, concern for, commitment to, belief in, [and] alienating distance from . . . the others who have made this or that music in the process of making their worlds.92 For when we stop loving God, the time spent laboring to preserve the presence of his absence can then be taken up with rectifying the absence of the tangible presence of humans in a world that had been too busy loving God. Coming from an engagement with the work of Foucault, for Tomlinson this would mean the love of human difference, rather than different kinds of humans. Yet even with the ethical weight of all this looming over her, the music itself, with seeming indifference to our concerns regarding how she might be misused and abused, remains with cigarette in hand, seated at the table she has been asked to leavea stain, indelible as a ghost. And so maybe, as Hooper writes, in practice one can problematize a conceptthe truth, a fact, the music itself only for so long before feeling obliged to acknowledge that its continued deployment probably points to some necessary moment that cannot in fact be problematized entirely away.93 We can give two illustrations of why this is structurally so. First, from Hoopers own strongly Habermasian perspective, the concept of the music itself constitutes a logical necessity in order to establish the possibility of meaningful discussion. In order to think, one needs to be able to think about some thing, so if scholars claim that the musical thing as we understand it does not existthat, in Bohlmans phrase, music may be what we think it is; it may not be94and yet still assert on some level that they are talking about music, then, in short, they are not thinking. As Hooper puts it in his critique of Bohlmans statement, it is almost as though Bohlman wants to rethink music without thinking it.95 To a degree,
90. Tomlinson, Musical Pasts and Postmodern Musicologies, 2021; and idem, Music and Historical Critique, 9798. 91. Henry Klumpenhouwer, Commodity-Form, Disavowal, and Practices of Music Theory, in Music and Marx, ed. Regula Burckhardt Qureshi, 2341 (New York: Routledge, 2002). 92. Tomlinson, Musical Pasts, and Posmodern Musicologies, 24; and idem, Music and Historical Critique, 101. 93. Hooper, Discourse of Musicology, 74. 94. Philip V. Bohlman, Ontologies of Music, in Cook and Everist, Rethinking Music, 17. 95. Hooper, Discourse of Musicology, 94.
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Hoopers construal of the music itself is rather like a regulative idea as dened by Kant. For example, in the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant writes that a regulative idea directs the understanding toward a certain goal upon which the routes marked out by all its rules converge, as upon their point of intersection. This point is indeed a mere idea, a focus imaginarius, from which, since it lies quite outside the bounds of possible experience, the concepts of understanding do not in reality proceed.96 Thus, according to Hooper, scholars must recognize a quasi-transcendental necessity in the prior presupposition of a music in itself in order that we can then, if we so choose, proceed to explore its multiply mediated condition.97 It is a necessary moment, rather than an uncontested goal.98 Second, from a basic deconstructive position, the concept of the music itself cannot be erased because of the supplementary logic that necessitates its presence as a kind of foil guaranteeing the rhetorical success of the term (context) that claims to supplant it.99 As linguistically inscribed terms, both the music itself and context are founded, in Derridas language, in an originary lack, which only the supplementary presence of the other can mask. In his analysis of how disciplinary identities within musical research are constituted in relation either to context or text (the music itself ), Korsyn makes a similar point, arguing that narratives of disciplinary legitimation often include narratives of delegitimation.100 At this moment of his argument, Korsyn is working from a more Lacanian rather than Derridean perspective, but his conclusion, which seeks to illuminate the mutual reliance of seemingly opposed terms, nevertheless resonates. With regard to text and context, is it not possible that each receives his truth from the other in inverted form?101 Timely as such analyses are for musicologys critical self-reection, they still remain too tainted by the work ethic, at least for the decadent purposes of Part 2 of this enquiry. What interests me is not so much why the music itself is a requisite conceptual moment, nor how its negative invocation is necessary for the creation of disciplinary identities. At this point, I am not even working
96. Cited in Howard Caygill, A Kant Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1995), 130. A less clunky denition is given by Andrew Bowie: An idea that orients our thinking without us being able to claim to give an account of it which proves what it refers to really exists. Introduction to German Philosophy: From Kant to Habermas (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003), 278. 97. Hooper, Discourse of Musicology, 95. 98. Admittedly, Hooper does not deny the historical and cultural construction of the notion of the music itself, but he quite rightly points out, and in a fashion redolent of what I have said about equipment, that its status as such is no more reason to abandon it than recognizing the contingent origins of gendered approaches to musical textuality in the discourse(s) of postwar feminism would somehow neutralize their efcacy or negate their utility. Ibid., 88. 99. The seminal formulation of the supplement occurs, of course, in Derridas famous reading of Rousseaus essay on the origins of language, in Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). 100. Korsyn, Decentering Music, 79. 101. Ibid., 85.
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with the exceedingly productive project of regarding how the strategic placement of the music itself might work for precise political ends, although I am endlessly teetering on its edge.102 Rather, while musicology is off sorting out its political credentials, I am attracted by a certain late Heideggerian theme: on the import of what happens as a result of something when it isnt doing anything. For Heidegger in The Origin of the Work of Art, something is what it is only when it is being used, and, thus, is not directly focused within the frame of the conceptualizing gaze. Thus, to cite his famous example: The peasant woman wears her shoes in the eld. Only here are they what they are. They are all the more genuinely so, the less the peasant woman thinks about the shoes while she is at work.103 If one changes shoes for music, then the Heidegger of this sentence could easily dine with ethnomusicologists. Heideggers surprising move, however, is to deect his argument away from the most obvious pragmatic and empirical conclusion: that when the shoes are not on the peasant womans feet they are then, by denition, less. He argues, by contrast, that things can release something of themselves (for Heidegger, their being) and so in a certain sense are made more when placed in a certain abstraction from their functional ground, as for example when they enter the only seemingly representational frame of the work of art. As Eagleton observes, Heidegger shares something here with the Russian Formalists notion of defamiliarization.104 The hammer gives up its being only when it is broken; the peasants shoes, only when they appear in Vincent van Goghs famous painting. In George Steiners prcis, for Heidegger Art lets-be. Art is not, as in Plato or Cartesian realism, an imitation of the real. It is the more real.105 What is striking in Heideggers oft-read essay is the strangely uctuating, holographic double-focus he assigns to things: on the one hand, available as pieces of equipment through the interested knowledge of praxis ; on the other hand, disclosed as autonomous beings in and of themselves on the disinterested stage of art. Simultaneously, they are both sinking out of sight into the thicket of their functional determinants and rising up into the clearing of their being. This said, how is the disclosive power Heidegger assigns to the more representational arts to apply to music? After all, music, as Steiner points out, is noticeably absent from Heideggers work.106 Are we to imagine, for example, that Rameaus famous keyboard piece La poule discloses the being of chicken? One would hope not. Musics endlessly proven ability to sustain itself
102. For example, see Martin Scherzinger, The Return of the Aesthetic: Musical Formalism and Its Place in Political Critique, in Beyond Structural Listening? ed. Andrew DellAntonio, 25277 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). 103. Heidegger, Origin of the Work of Art, 33. 104. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), 64. 105. George Steiner, Martin Heidegger (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 133 34, and 136. 106. Ibid., 4345, and 13132.
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without necessitating a directly invoked referenteven if, in Heideggers formulation, that referent is not being imitated but revealedsuggests that music might be thought differently. In short, music seems more like an extreme case of a thing than an art which discloses a things being. Self-evidently, like the peasant womans shoes, it functions as equipment, and therefore contextually. It can be molded into a rigid duple to t the feet of marching men, for example. Yet how would we respond, Steiner asks, if a ctive questioner from another planet where to ask us what music is? We would sing a tune or strum a piece and say, unhesitatingly, This is music. If he asked next, What does it mean? the answer could be there, overwhelmingly, in us, but exceedingly difcult to articulate externally. Asked just this question of one of his compositions, Schumann played it again. In music, being and meaning are inextricable.107 Unlike a van Gogh painting, which reveals being, musicit would seemhas being. There is a brazen obviousness and impalpability, an enveloping nearness and innite regress. After all, being, like music, has a history and a meaning, a dependence on man and dimensions transcending humanity. Heidegger, we might note, also sees being as an active nothingness (das nichtende Nichts)perhaps like Music smoking her cigarette.108 One of the great themes of Heideggers philosophy is that we have come to take the being of being for granted (We forget to be astonished109), and viewed from this perspective, we might argue that musicologys sometimes prioritization of musics contextual embeddedness is one manifestation of our forgetting of musics being. If for the moment we can take this on board, how then might musics being be disclosed? What is the frame that will abstract music so that we might be exposed to, and astonished once more by, its active nothingness? Evidently, a painting, though useful in relationship to the being of a pair of shoes, is not helpful in this instance; one can visually depict people playing music, or one can show its effects by painting a swooning audience member, but one cannot depict it. But music theory, however strange this might seem, canand not only for the obvious reason that it necessitates as one of its opening maneuvers a certain protective framing of the musical object from cultural practices. In an important article already mentioned, Agawu observed that by reverting to more conventional analytic methods and conclusions purportedly radical musicological work fails to acknowledge the surplus of detail that theory-based analysis produces.110 Music, in just being the object it is, not doing anything at all, nevertheless can still not be pinned down to one analytic reading that would capture its unchanging state. Music smoking her cigarette
107. 108. 109. 110. original) Ibid., 44. Ibid., 4445. Ibid., 45. Agawu, Analyzing Music under the New Musicological Regime, 304. (emphasis in
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is always in excess of our determinations, as if in singing only her own tune, we realize that she is always singing something new. The static invariance of the object itself is precisely what allows for the excessive fecundity, the continued slippage as one new revelation after another keeps owering forth. Seemingly straightforward chordal afliations can proliferate with multiple meanings, as Charles J. Smith has most carefully and astutely demonstrated.111 A single interval in Beethovens Violin Concerto in D Major can, in Joseph Dubiels beautiful exploration of the D in the rst movements opening tutti, have a sonic identity that transcends the options made available by the going theory. And yet the theory still remains valid, if only for the reason that its application helps us to articulate this escaping of its [own] categories as part of the pieces sound.112 Richard Cohn and Douglas Dempster have illustrated how musical unity itself may be pluralized. Music theory has been organized primarily around a canonwhich for Cohn and Dempster denotes a rule, law, or governing principlethat seeks to establish a unity certied by prolongational hierarchies.113 The investigations that theorists have made into the possibility of plural unities, however, attest that music theorists are equally committed to a second, independent canon, which may best be characterized as richness.114 These theorists work bespeaks of musics inadvertent generosity, its sublime productivity even when it is at rest, and maybe it is exactly this that, tentatively speaking, discloses musics being. However, if on the one hand this interpretive proliferation points to the almost impossible plenitude of the musical object itself, it also brings negation in its wake, and, thus, the sense of things being hollowed out. For the very fact that something else can keep emerging from interpretive engagement with one musical object indexes, in a Hegelian sense, the productive failure of each engagements ability to fully constitute itself. When exposed to the disclosure of musical being, the subject is, thus, negated. And so the musical object at rest functions in this scenario like the Hegelian absolute. Hegels detractors often script the absolute as some kind of abstract idea that has no tangible contact with our reality per se, but whose invocation
111. Charles J. Smith, The Functional Extravagance of Chromatic Chords, Music Theory Spectrum 8 (1986): 94139. 112. Joseph Dubiel, Composer, Theorist, Composer/Theorist, in Cook and Everist, Rethinking Music, 272. Dubiel has also examined the rst movement of Beethovens Violin Concerto in Hearing, Remembering, Cold Storage, Purism, Evidence, and Attitude Adjustment, Current Musicology 60 and 61 (1996): 2650. See also Scherzingers critique of Dubiels position in Feminine/Feminist? In Quest of Names with No Experiences (Yet), in Postmodern Music/Postmodern Thought, ed. Judith Lochhead and Joseph Auner, 14173 (New York and London: Routledge, 2002). 113. Richard Cohn and Douglas Dempster, Hierarchical Unity, Plural Unities: Toward a Reconciliation, in Disciplining Music: Musicology and Its Canons, ed. Katherine Bergeron and Philip V. Bohlman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 178. 114. Ibid. (emphasis in original)
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nevertheless damages reality itself. In this misunderstanding, Hegels thought is reduced to an oppressively metaphysical system in which Geist is constantly striving toward the absolute. In this parody, Hegels philosophy is misrepresented as a system in which positions within binaries are annulled through the violence exerted upon them by the absolute, which collapses specicities into each other and then further in the (w)hole of the absolute itself. From this perspective, even in some fairly erudite readings by intellectual historians,115 the turning of the dialectic is scripted as a kind of totalitarian horror story in which differences are forced mutually to annul each other for the purposes of an indifferent higher good. But as the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy puts it in a widely acknowledged book on Hegel, the presupposition of the absolute is, in fact, made precisely in order to ruin all presupposition or pregivenness.116 As Nancy argues, Hegels invocation of the absolute is a ruse that allows for the possibility of what would commonly be understood as its complete opposite: the endless movement of thought. Thus, the seeming irrefutability of the Hegelian absolute has, in fact, a paradoxically deregulatory effect. Rather than directing the understanding comfortingly toward the absolute itself, for Hegel the absolute is an impossibility whose presence within the frame of understanding bends the space of our normative perceptions and thus acts as a catalyst for unnerving and negating our present positions. What we had assumed was just there becomes the point from which the transformation into otherwise might occur. Hegel, as Nancy claims, is therefore the inaugural thinker of the contemporary world; he is witness of the worlds entry into a history in which it is no longer just a matter of changing form, of replacing one vision and one order by some other vision and some other order, but in which the one and only pointof view and of orderis that of transformation itself.117 And so perhaps at this juncture we should risk the following rather bold, if provisional, conclusion. While musicology is off negotiating its own political problematic, what music in the meantime does while it is doing nothing is to instigate in the subjects who are exposed to it the very shift that musicology itself needs to undergo. Music negates (us). So could musicology perhaps achieve more politically by doing less, hanging out mindlessly with the unemployed, with music after all? Dance It would be convenient to assert that music after all is negation, but to do so would recapitulate a problem that the previous section had sought to erase.
115. For example, see Hegel in Isaiah Berlin, Freedom and Its Betrayal: Six Enemies of Human Liberty, ed. after Berlins death by Henry Hardy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 74104. 116. Jean-Luc Nancy, Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative, trans. Jason Smith and Steven Miller (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 10. 117. Ibid., 3, 67.
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Part of the limitation of the contextualizing position is that it risks seeing the musical text as merely a conduit back to the social, and thus masking the fact that, in Hoopers words, music is clearly also both more and less than the social totality of which it is a part. Less, in that it is one component within a larger system upon which it depends for its production, reproduction, consumption and interpretation; more, in that it cannot simply be reduced to a passive reection or expression of that same system.118 Reading through music as but negation would threaten to lead to the assumption that music is, yet again, fully available to discursive articulation. However, the following succinct question can make such certainties stutter: If all we are can be stated in words, why does our being also need to be articulated in music, as every known human culture seems to suggest?119 Music is not simply parasitic on language, and so an acknowledgment that music itself, culturally unemployed, strikes a different register in relation to the articulation of both its contextual determination and its status as negation is required. To focus on this registral shiftin Carloyn Abbates terms, on the drastic phenomenological presence of music itself, particularly in the moment of its live performancewould seem productive.120 Drawing on Vladamir Janklvitch, Abbate argues that musics precious humanity and social reality are articulated not by insisting that musical works trace historical facts or release specic sanctioned cultural associations, but by emphasizing an engagement with music as tantamount to an engagement with the phenomenal world and its inhabitants.121 Music, in this sense, becomes deeply ethical: playing or hearing music can produce a state where resisting the aw of loquaciousness represents a moral ideal, marking human subjects who have been remade in an encounter with an other.122 For Abbate, both hermeneutic and formalist approaches to music are uneasy with such immediate aural presence . . . [and] this may reect unspoken uneasiness about performed music as an ephemeral object, subject to instantaneous loss, but equally importantly as something that acts upon us and changes us.123 If the sudden unscripted vulnerability to the phenomenological into which music in its drastic presenttense condition can seduce might negate if but momentarily the certainty of Gnostics, could it not also act upon the potentially universalizing selfcontainment of contextual politics? Theorizing within the orbit of the very different world of Adorno, Leppert in an important recent essay gives credence to the possibility that it could: The presence of musicany music references a lack. And lack, properly understood, is not an ontological
118. Hooper, Discourse of Musicology, 86. (emphasis in original) 119. Andrew Bowie, Aesthetics and Subjectivity: From Kant to Nietzsche, 2nd ed. (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2003), 3. 120. Carolyn Abbate, MusicDrastic or Gnostic? Critical Inquiry 30 (2004): 50536. 121. Ibid., 530. 122. Ibid. 123. Ibid., 532.
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condition but a social one. Lack, in other words, invites critique; critique in turn is the precondition for social change.124 The utopian nature of Lepperts questions does not discredit them. As noted in the previous section, contextual politics has been resistant to utopian thinking, and so to expose it to the searing light of the utopian could offer the productive respite of a clear view from elsewhere. How the utopian is articulated, however, requires judgment. Although Leppert fully takes on board the necessary impossibilities that form the tension eld of Adornos utopian dialectic of art and hope, his primary point is that music as such, even in its own common ordinariness and inescapability, signals a difference frommore, an opposition towhat otherwise passes as the ordinary and the expected. Music posits the sonic possibility of something better.125 Much of what I argue below is in harmony with Lepperts claim. Nevertheless, I would ultimately reinscribe music back into the logic of equipment already outlined, and so forefront its radical ethical and political ambivalence. Music does indeed point to the possibility of something other, but what that might be is disturbingly reliant not only on the nexus of forces at work at the moment we fall into the blank transformative hole it opens up, but on that which cannot be known until after the event that music allows. Lepperts careful silence with regard to utopian futurity is commendable, and not just because it is appropriately congruent with Adornos theological insistence on the injunction against naming the name of God. As I have said, if it is the case that to take the crisis of the worlds wrong seriously means that it must already be reverberating through our discourse before it empirically presents itself as an object to our understanding, then to articulate Utopia directly would be to reincarcerate it in the very condition from beyond which the light of its promise must shine back on us.126 By comparison, for the purposes of this present enquiry, Abbates position seems less useful, even though there is indeed much of great value in her much-discussed article, not least of which are the many necessary respites it offers from the sometimes sober injunctions of the politics of musicology. Commendably unafraid of enchantment, it does not insist on the absolute authority of cultural and political work, and so later portions of this argument will indeed smile with it. However, there is very little built into its structure to curtail its immanent tendencies, which move too easily toward painting pictures of paradigmatic dramas that dene the ethical ground of the human. Critical as Abbate is of the potentially constrictive nature of contextualizing
124. Leppert, Music Pushed to the Edge of Existence, 9596. 125. Ibid., 98. 126. An extensive examination of the musical resonance of Adornos and Benjamins dialectics of hope is to be found in Berthold Hoeckners remarkable Programming the Absolute: Nineteenth-Century German Music and the Hermeneutics of the Moment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002).
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music for political ends, in its looming assumption that exposure to music as drastic entails exposure to a human-dening ethical encounter, her alternative replicates one of the key criticisms of contextual politics that I have already made of contextual politics: the assumption of an underlying humanity. So before we arrive at the clearing she has opened up for music in the claustrophobic thicket of the discursive, she has already ploughed the ground and grown another discursively fertilized shrub. I may question the light that Leppert shines into the clearing he discloses, but it is still a space, and sun hats are not difcult to nd; Abbates clearing, however, is too overgrown. This ahistorical perspective on human behavior is also replicated in the way she articulates her object of critique, the hermeneutic impulse. In Abbates essay it appears historically only vaguely, as part of a continuing Romantic allegiance whose life expectancy has been greatly improved by twentieth-century media developments;127 its primary articulation, however, is as behavioral trait, a kind of transhistorical potential for emotional meanness that has merely been exacerbated by historical conditions. As the above examination of unemployment attests, I do not claim that there is nothing other than history, and so Abbates ahistorical proclivity is not the primary obstacle to my using it as a piece of equipment in my investigation. But the validity of such ethical encounters as a means of dening the human is not self-evident and seems to require further justication.128 Faced with Abbates phenomenological drasticness, a still important question of the politics of musicology is necessary: what historical work is the ahistorical in her discourse being co-opted to perform? I suggest that by moving the problem of the Gnostic away from the historical and toward the behavioral, Abbate is able to soundproof her essay from the noise of the political, which, in our dialectically totalized world, must by denition be audible on some level within it. It is not that she is not right with regard to the Gnostic; it is that she will not let herself be right enough. This creates a self-serving economy, for by lowering the threat of the Gnostic she can more effectively elevate the efcacy of the drastic. Notwithstanding its strange reference to 9/11, the essay is reliant on a certain blindness with regard to the political so that the ethical might prevail over the hermeneutic, and this produces ideologically effective collateral that
127. Abbate, MusicDrastic or Gnostic? 523: Perhaps hermeneutics was reborn of cinematic kitsch and manipulation, with the academic platform, like our still-powerful emotions upon hearing sublime classical works, now being in part a Hollywood by-product. Is there anything wrong with that? 128. For example, that justication would come if we make a more extended detour into Janklvitchs ethical philosophy. Janklvitch was the Chair of Moral Philosophy at the Sorbonne for many years, which provides some context for his position; moreover, the question of the ethics of alterity is a key theme in twentieth-century French philosophy, notably in the work of Emmanuel Lvinas and the later Jacques Derrida, and far from uncontroversial. Alain Badiou, for example, sees it as a form of theologically tinged nihilism. See Badiou, Ethics, 30, and also chap. 2, Does the Other Exist? (1829), which directly confronts Lvinas.
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invalidates her claim that with performance and the drastic there is no place to hide, and that we are left in the ideological raw. Music may well be able to do this, but not in Abbates formulation. As a result, her essay exudes a comforting sense that the world is lovelier than it is. If contextualization and discursive articulation as negation threaten to exclude the phenomenological fact of music, musics drasticness threatens to exclude the fact of the worlds wrong. Moreover, it potentially reinscribes us back into the worlds problematic using the lure of an attractive vision of humanity whose potential shuddering on the worlds dark web we are encouraged to ignore. Abbate gives us little idea how her human might resist such reinscription, and so her essay cannot offer mine a model of musics ability to negate. In her essay music is primarily a conduit to an identication with ethics As a result, the essay is neither dialectical nor properly politicaland she does not claim it is. Music of course can negate; the previous sections detour into music theory showed how in doing hardly anything it created enough pressure to burst certain boils. But it is far from obvious that it always will. Resistance to negation is strong, since the subject does not survive the ordeal of negativity: he effectively loses his very essence and passes over into his Other, to quote from iek once more.129 If, for example, we are dealing with an ideological interpolation, it is not merely the case that we get rid of the problem through some simple act of unmasking it as false consciousness. As iek has pointed out, the fantasmatic nature of ideology is not the false consciousness of a (social) being, as if that beings innocence could be returned to. Rather, it is this being itself in so far as it is supported by false consciousness. 130 If there is to be some real, structural transformation, that can come only, in Hegels famous phrase, by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it. And that is not a beautiful thing, not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it.131 So when beautiful music starts edging us toward the sublime precipice of negation, many take precaution. Odysseus, faced with the otherness of the Sirens music, has himself tied to the mastto make sure that his temporary negation will not lead to him cutting his bonds to how his world has been deemed and so negate it. As Adorno and Max Horkheimer write in their famous interpretation of this myth, the bonds with which [Odysseus] has irredeemably tied himself to practice, also keep the Sirens away from practice: their temptation is neutralized and becomes a mere object of contemplationbecomes art.132 Odysseus wants to feel what it would be like
129. iek, The Eclipse of Meaning: On Lacan and Deconstruction, in Interrogating the Real, ed. Rex Butler and Scott Stephens (New York and London: Continuum, 2005), 217. 130. iek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York and London: Verso, 1989), 21. 131. G. W. F. Hegel, Preface to Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 19. 132. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1991), 34.
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to revolt without becoming so revolting as to actually do so. He demands to be stuck to something, since musics presence can act like an oil slick, making the performed irrefutability of the roles in which we are presently xed slide to where they said they never would be.133 A painting, by comparison, rarely has the ability to enact anything as lewd as what music enforces upon us, for example, when it moves us into the dance. A paintings powers lie elsewhere. We might elaborate on musics threat through the following allegorical tableau vivant, which appears sometimes on Saturday nights: the boyfriend sulkily stuck to the bar while the girlfriend attempts to coax his ship onto the rocks beneath the sea of the dance oor where the rubbish that he has devoted himself to being during the week will then momentarily gloriously drown. It is interesting to pause and consider who is conventionally associated with dance. The beginnings of a list would include women, African Americans, and homosexual men. On the one hand, they are adored, for through their ability respond to music and relinquish themselves to another bodily and mental inscription, they offer us an image of how our lives might not only be otherwise, but better, more beautifully structured and meaningfully engaged. Bad dancing disturbs this process of suggestion, for it shows how the encounter might fail, or how we can delude ourselves of its success. Dancers offer us a potential truth about music: that it is neither, pace Romanticism, the embodiment of the transcendent,134 nor, pace certain postmodern articulations, merely part of what already is; rather, the truth dancers offer us is that music forms space and environment in such a way that that which we have deemed all can become something else. The repeated connections that have been made between music and hope then are more than just affected emotings born of those addicted to delusory enchantments. This does not mean that in relationship to dance, music is therefore simply the agent of our change. Music retains the strangely holographic double focus of the Heideggarian thing discussed in the previous section; it is both an active part of praxis and yet not fully consumed by that role. If we turn up at the club too early, before anyone is dancing, Music, indifferent to our indifference, is nevertheless playing; when we leave and the lights are on, Music is often still quite obliviously loud, smoking her cigarette and failing properly to say goodbye, as if wed never been there anyway. In part, music does its own thing, and in so doing, inspires us to do something in its company. Love after all comes from sustaining a productive distance, not from some kind of fatalistic fusion into the One. Love is a dual adventure of the body and the mind, as Badiou writes; it is
133. Regarding musics contrasting ability to make things stick, see Abbate, MusicDrastic or Gnostic? 532 and passim. 134. As Lydia Goehr has written with regard to such aesthetics: The suggestion that music carried transcendent meaning led soon enough to the view that instrumental music did more than point to the transcendent. It also embodied it; see The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 154.
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the experience and thought of what the Two is, a world refracted and transgured by contrast.135 To witness dancers is to witness a certain kind of love. However, the fact that dancers can become something else in relation to music means that they are not just women, homosexual men, and African Americans, but also bitches, fags, and niggers. Obviously, the point being made here is not to replicate unacceptable essentializations of these groups in relation to spuriously assumed innate abilities for bodily activity in relationship to music, as if to say that African Americans are charmingly and childishly authentic and so are best suited to the playpen of the dance oor, that women are prelogical and overly emotional and so ourish amidst the semantic vagueness of music, or that gay men are sex-obsessed and so will jump at any opportunity to hipwiggle should the possibility of a grope and more be in the ofng. Rather, it is to point out the disturbing doubling that splits the frame in which the identication of these gures with dance takes place, and which likewise doubles the relationship to music itself. For if certain people, through the magnicence of their dancing, can inspire others to love them, it is also the case that it can inspire a fury of volatile questions that are ung outwards and also rattle around noisily in the interior, like malevolent peas in the hard-shelled maraca-head of the affronted: How could one possibly trust dancers when they can so easily give up sustaining the roles that would keep things continuing as they are? How could one trust someone who shows you that you are not to be trusted precisely since you are interested in such continuities? How could you trust someone who shows you how impotent your attempts are of giving up the deathly continuation of your own identications? How could one bear someone who proves that within ourselves lies our self s own negation? The problematic identication of frequently marginalized groups with dance is therefore strategically smart, since it comes with its own security system; at any moment, should the spectacle impinge too far on the spectator, and Music threaten to start singing her siren song, an immediately available set of prejudices, like a police siren, can be activated, and the performing animals will go scuttling back into their cage. (After the shaman has performed his medicinal magic, he must return to his hut outside the communitys perimeter.) In relationship to dancers, the obscene insult (racist, sexist, or homophobic) is a neutralizing strategy against the possibility of negation. To be identied by someone else as a gay man is potentially relatively neutral; to be called a faggot is, by contrast, to be told that you are nothing but a gay man, which is a different thing altogetherand not only for the agrant assumption that a gay man is, therefore, in and of himself, not much of anything anyway. When music starts to become too much, the following common-sensical and violent assertion often sets up a barrier to the experiencing of its limit: Its just music,
135. Badiou, Century, 145.
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after all. It is an assertion made in the name of self-preservation and so it is not dialecticaland neither does it aim to be. In Hegel, negation and continuity (in one of its manifestations, selfpreservation) seem to be compelled into the dialectic relationship that will create the movement of becoming by means of a kind of teleological anticipation of what comes later.136 But it is not immediately obvious why this should work. As I argued in the previous passage, the anticipation of something else offered by dancers can make the dialectic come to a halt. Negation for Hegel, however, does not simply imply that we break out of the narcissistic enclosure of our present position by means of a notion of an alternative future that now strikes us as more attractive. Hegel remains a gure of the Enlightenment in his adherence to a principle of presuppositionlessness: that in order to understand, thought can not be motivated by some static certainty existing outside of itself. But this leads to an antimony: if continuity and negation engender the movement of dialectical becoming only by means of an anticipation, but that anticipation invalidates the movement of understanding by driving it by means of something outside of itself, then how can anything ever become? Regarding anticipation, Hegel is not asserting a productive sense of expectancy with regard to something in particular, but rather, in Julian Roberts nice prcis, he asserts the capacity to act purposively without a preexisting purpose.137 In most commentary on Hegel, this strangely telos-free activity is understood as the immanent impulse of pure reason itself, and so, particularly in the context of postmodern suspiciousness regarding such things, cause for complaint. Provocative, however, is the resonance between the spontaneous movement of the dialectic and Kants famous denition of the beautiful as purposiveness without purpose. Negation potentially arises out of a moment of play, and so play is a dialectical concept.138 If negation does indeed arise out of a moment of free play, then it cannot be turned into an injunction: always negate! Rather it is something that one can get caught out into, as when the dancer going through the motions is moved and starts to be danced; or when an improvisation on a standard becomes its own thing, as if it were now the original; or, in Hegel, when the seemingly straightforward direction of logic suddenly confronts its own inherent contradiction and shifts direction. For better or worse, negation is less the result of a decision and more an inevitability. Negativity is not made, but is a fact; negation merely provides it with an opportunity in which its existence already within our thinking can reassert its destabilizing force and make its pressure felt. Negativity is the underlying lack in that which has been conceptually
136. For a discussion of anticipation see Julian Roberts, German Philosophy: An Introduction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988), 75. 137. Ibid., 76. 138. This strictly dialectical inscription of play distinguishes it from the kinds of validations of play that one nds in postmodern discourse; for example, see Korsyn, Decentering Music, 10.
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determined, and negation turns that into a productive force; it is a paradoxical exchange in which by being exposed to the fact that our concepts are less, we get the magnicence of more, the full presence of an absence. In the words of the great Portugese poet Fernando Pessoa: Yellow, amazed, utters / The black centre thats all.139 And so negation is strongly aligned with music, since before all the other arts in the West had rather self-consciously emancipated themselves from adherence to representation and meaning and into the real, if tense, possibilities of free play, musics capacity for a play that might negate logos and melt frozen social relations had always been so evidently a part of its being that commentators had been forced to draw attention to it so that suitable warnings could be made. In St. Augustine, musics potential for negation threatens to distract him from God. During the Enlightenment fears were engendered by the thought that music might distract from reason if it could not quickly be shown to be reasonable itself.140 In certain postmodern arenas it is asserted that music must be made fully available to the discursive, lest our politics be unnerved by whatever echoing might be left over. Of course, even if we take all this on board, it might still be too utopian to expect musics play to do the job of negating the political limitations within our own discourses, and so perhaps we should separate music from the sober process of thinking through the political problems themselves. Is it not, after all, a naive stretch of a seductive metaphor to propose that a political ideology can dance itself into an ecstasy of negation and so step beyond itself into something new? What if political ideologies are simply bad dancers?141 The distinction between play and thought, however, is far from absolute, and so even if we are just trying to think, music, irritatingly, can still be heard in the background.142 Take, for example, the following phrase of Adorno: Every thought resembles play.143 For Adorno, in order to think about things, one must do so for the sake of the pleasure that comes from the movement, in and of itself, of ones thought. Understanding something can occur only through an element of exaggeration, of over-shooting the object, of self-detachment from the weight of the factual144through a pleasure that exceeds, again like dance, the instrumental conceptualization of thought as merely the means
139. Fernando Pessoa, I Still Keep, in Fernando Pessoa: Selected Poems, 2nd ed., trans. Jonathan Grifn (London: Penguin Books, 1982), 138. 140. For example, see Matthew Rileys erudite and meticulous Musical Listening in the German Enlightenment: Attention, Wonder and Astonishment (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004). 141. Here a dialogue could be productive by considering Lydia Goehrs Adorno, Schoenberg, and the Totentanz der Prinzipienin Thirteen Steps, this Journal 56 (2003): 595636. 142. This is the case even though, as Adorno argued, thought can never just be consumed fully into musics concept. See, for example, On the Contemporary Relationship of Philosophy and Music, newly trans. Susan H. Gillespie, in Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 13561. 143. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London and New York: Verso, 1978), 127. 144. Ibid., 126.
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toward an understanding of its object. As a result, intellectual labor (thinking) resonates with artistic labor, for like dance they both require the capacity for being voluntarily involuntary.145 As he writes elsewhere, Thought is happiness, even where it denes unhappiness: by enunciating it.146 And so the play in thought preserves the pleasure that broken life (i.e., fully administered and instrumentalized life) attempts to dispel. For Adorno, this broken life, presented under the aegis of progress has anathematized both the selfabandonment of thought and that of pleasure.147 By comparison, proper thought, that unbarbaric side of philosophy, lies in the tacit awareness of the element of irresponsibility, of blitheness springing from the volatility of thought itself.148 From play. Among other things, there are echoes here of the deeply aesthetic strain in Marx, which likewise echoes German Romantic thinking, in particular that of Friedrich Schillers Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man. For Marx, human activities, including sensation and thought, should be ends in themselves, requiring no further justication. But this aesthetic state is not possible within the means-orientated forms of capitalist society. The sense caught up in crude practical need, Marx famously writes in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, has only a restricted sense. For the starving man, it is not the human form of food that exists, but only its abstract being as food; it could just as well be there in its crudest form, and it would be impossible to say wherein this feeding-activity differs from that of animals.149 Marxs continuation then links us back to Adorno: The care-burdened man in need has no sense for the nest play, a point that Marx illustrates through the example of the dealer in minerals who sees only the mercantile value but not the beauty and the unique nature of the mineral.150 From this perspective, if we assert that in thinking through contextual politics musicology should refuse the negation offered by play, this would not only indicate the seriousness of our commitment, but would also bespeak of a certain identication with the negatively underdeveloped contexts and social structures to which our thinking has been conformi.e., our misery. What is useful about this line of thinking is that it offers a potential exit from the conundrum of anticipation within dialectics and the not illogical resistance it can create, such as in the pragmatic question as to why we should give up the potential pittance of what we already have for the uncertainties of some future without guarantee in which we might end up with nothing. For
145. Ibid., 222. 146. Adorno, Resignation, in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. and with a preface by Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 293. 147. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 29. 148. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 127. 149. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. In The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1978), 89. 150. Ibid.
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play, which negates and so offers us the possibility of a future different from what exists now, is at the same moment an authentic manifestation of that something else now in the present. All happiness is but a fragment of the entire happiness men are denied, and are denied by themselves.151 Play is not merely instrumental, a means to another end, it is also just what it is; and so again we come up against that Heiddegarian holographic split between praxis and being. When Adorno enunciates unhappiness, it is as much for the happiness of being able to enunciate as it is to formulate truth. The dancers on the beach in Ibiza are not only euphoric because the sun rising over the horizon of the Mediterranean is the promise of better things to come; they do not keep returning, as many do, simply because that time is still not yet, and thus there is still more dancing work to be done. Thankfully they are not, in my experience of myself, so generous. The fact that so much of the music played in the clubs there is pervaded by messages of hope and various transformations, both in words and sound, of the dawn-of-a-new-day leitmotif, is as much a productive decoy as the somewhat simplistic slogans of a utopian political praxis. As such it is therefore again a place where dancing is a form of love; love for dancing itself. For as iek puts it, The underlying paradox is that love, precisely as the Absolute, should not be posited as a direct goalit should retain the status of a byproduct, of something we get as an undeserved grace.152 Play is done in the name of the future through a move toward selfenclosing itself within the fact of its present play; the negation of contextual politics is instigated by the name of the political future of musicology but functions only through a love for the present moment of negation itself. So the nal dialectical twist is that the potential problem with contextual politics is not just that it does not open itself up to the possibility of something else, but rather that it does not trust itself enough to turn its back for a moment on the future it has already decided upon and in whose reection its identity has been uncomfortably xedas Lacan reminds us, Narcissus does not survive well his encounter with the mirror.153 And so not only can contextual politics neither play nor work properly politically at this present historical moment; more fatally, it perhaps cannot know. Of course, there is always the risk of a narcissistic wounding when one steps from the unfocused intoxications of the bar out onto the vertiginous exposure of the dance oor itself. But unless you dance, you cannot know what you might be when you are dancing.
151. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973), 404. 152. iek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 19. 153. In the essay on the mirror-stage, Lacan observes that accompanying the childs erotic attachment to the imago of its ego is a potential aggressivity towards that image, for the child can never be fully consummated with the image and so the truth of its ego can never be fully secured: The Mirror-Stage as Formative of the I Function, as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience, in crits: A Selection, trans. Bruce Fink (New York and London: Norton, 2002), 39.
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Part 3: Rest
With a severity that I nd attractive, Hooper has put the contemporary musicological notion of responsibility into focus as follows:
It would appear, then, that if those involved in the study of music are not simply indulging in what would ultimately represent a self-serving and selsh interest (or hobby)whose institutionalization merely serves as an indirect means of acquiring an iniquitous share of the collective wealththen the study of music as an institutionalized discourse may well require a rst-order political or ethical justication; and one that penetrates beneath the supercial vicissitudes of meta-discursive debate.154
Writing this conclusion, as I am, with news of the crash of global economic markets thundering in close proximity and with the future of the state education system in which I am employed decidedly unclear and shaky, Hoopers words make perhaps more specic sense and are borne forth by a stronger political force than originally intended. One suspects that musicology will indeed be required to justify its existence on a frequent basis in the inevitably leaner years to come. Who knows, it may even be necessary for it to dissimulate, frequently, agrantly, in order to survive. Perhaps it will need to have formulated and memorized its own self-validations and be prepared to spit them out with the articulate rhetorical fury that straightened circumstances have been known to inspire in those caught in them. Indeed, for musicology, all this may well come to fruition. But before we all dash off to get ready for battle maybe we could pause one nal moment to reect. Asked why he had not taken on the mantle of Althusserian Marxism when it had seemed pressing that it be acknowledged widely as the predominant political force in the French university, Derrida replied I believed I had slower but also more urgent things to do.155 The urgency of our times makes it seem imperative that we should move faster, but I think that within our own work in the university itself, we should take the risk of going slower while the possibility still exists. After all, as Derrida frequently emphasized, the university is indeed one of the homes in which questions might dwell, and so we should ght to preserve the possibility of its continuance at all costs against the pervasive injunctions of instrumentality. And so maybe, out of respect, we might bow to a convention of certain narratives and slow down at this moment of potential departure. After all, important understandings have been known to be found at the moment of farewell. What is problematic with upping the political ante in the way that Hoopers remarks do is that it risks masking an assumption that I nd debatable: is it true
154. Hooper, Discourse of Musicology, 71. 155. Jacques Derrida, Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 19712001, ed. and trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 166.
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that without a rst-order political or ethical justication musicological practices are therefore merely decadent hobbies, self-serving and self-interested? As I have tried to illustrate with regard to contextual politics, within musicology itself the very presence of a justication can easily function to mask either a self interest, or the extra-disciplinary political inefcacy of those ideas whose ability to function broadly, the politics of musicology asserts, is proven by the fact that they seem appropriate for musicology itself. Again, I cannot emphasize too strongly, this politics has indeed often been remarkably productive for musicology. Nevertheless, when it assumes a direct correlation between musicological particularity and political universality, contemporary musicological discourse not only contradicts its own sometimes tautological insistence on particularity for the sake of particularity itself, but neutralizes how particularity can be meaningful in a dialectically mediated contrast to universality. To throw particularity into the gnashing teeth of the universal is, as Part 1 of this essay sought to illustrate, a necessary critical gesture. However, merely to conate particularity and universality, basically through a kind of microcosmic logic, comes with the affective risks of both the overly optimistic and the too-easily melancholic. Even though, like Ariel caught by Sycorax in the cruel indifference of the growing tree, the threads of the web can pass directly through and torturously interweave themselves amidst the sinews of life itself, there is still Ariel. And so, like music, there is musicology after allsplit into a double focus of praxis and being, both work and play, Parts 1 and 2. Musicology is a public site of contestations; yet it is also a secret late-night dance gracefully performed in the numerous separate clearings that make up that constellation of lonely desk lamps amidst the darkness. Of course, the urgency of the kinds of political issues I was outlining in Part 1 may accumulate such speed, get caught up so much in their own dance, that they literally propel themselves out of the musicological environment in which they had initially lain dormant. The dance of politics may, in the best sense, simply negate some musicologists into taking up political work per se, leaving musicology itself behind to share a smoke with Music, should she be paying attention. Famous examples from other arenas would include Noam Chomsky, who, though often speaking of the sadness of having had to have put linguistics to the side, nevertheless has taken his political dance all over the world. Or consider Arundhati Roy, whose astonishing rst novel, The God of Small Things, won the Man Booker prize, but who, expressing a similar melancholy yearning for literature and writing, has nevertheless remained consistently involved in political activism ever since. But politics is not the only dance, and I think we should be at least cautious of assuming that musicology must be that dance; that there must always be just one dance, musicology as politics, as opposed to the possibility of two. After all, a waltz might confuse its steps by trying to be a march, and, as I mentioned before, bad dancing can disturb us by making us witness how easily we can convince ourselves that we have enacted a transformation when we are, in fact, about to fall over. I am not
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saying that there have not or cannot be moments of a sudden productive synthesis, but I confess that a blasphemous part of me simply believes that the kinds of problems we repeatedly encounter today are of such un-precedented interconnected magnitude that it is simply a little delusional and potentially highly unproductive to assume that we can guarantee such syntheses are occurring in our work. To remain consistent with the assumption of a radical dialectical variability in thingsthe one constant stretching across Parts 1 and 2 of this essayI have to at least suggest the possibility that in just the same way that support for the music itself in the 1990s could be lambasted as a form of escapism (often with great sophistication and erudition156), then so too can the politics of musicology and its own seductions. Against injunctions that there should be only one (a synthesis of musicology and politics), there thus seems to be a profound need for the preservation of the space where the two (musicology and politics) can be at rest within their own respective movements. On the one hand, this would unclutter the doorway that can lead us unambiguously to clearly dened political work. As a result, it would stop us from getting embroiled in the sometimes convoluted and self-conscious political justications for musicology that can make us look disingenuous and somewhat decadent when we are questioned by those doing political work who are maybe genuinely confused by our claims. (This, at least, has been my experience of times in my own political activities when I have tried to link musicology and politics clearly together for others.) On the other hand, and more importantly, the invocation of two, both musicology and politics, would potentially preserve the possibility of a certain kind of home, which, unlike politicscharacterized as it has to be by the attempt to make a preformed answer manifest itself in the worldis a place in which potentiality itself dwells: a xed formed space in which, nevertheless, a different movement, as yet unknown, can come into being. Musicology, in short, could be like musica space where the possibility of something unexpected is allowedprecisely by not deciding in advance what is to be achieved. In this regard, I am reminded of Daniel Barenboim and the late Edward Saids East/West Divan orchestra project.157 The orchestra was set up to allow musicians from Israel and other countries in the Middle East to perform together. As a result, it necessitated that people commonly kept apart by their extreme political divisions and even potential mutual loathing of each other would come into contact. Barenboim has been adamant that the project was not conceived under the aegis of some kind of ideafor example, the Romantic notion that music brings people together and so will, by denition, resolve political and cultural conicts. In fact, Barenboim asserts that I
156. For example, see Suzanne G. Cusick, Gender, Musicology, and Feminism, in Cook and Everist, Rethinking Music, 47198. 157. The ethical and intersubjective import of this example has also been discussed in Andrew Bowie, Music, Philosophy, and Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 405 and passim.
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believe in cultural matterswith literature and, even better, with music, because it doesnt have to do with explicit ideas.158 Nevertheless, Said and Barenboim have noted that engagement with the kinds of endless questions that are raised by the performance of the music itself creates a space in which potential antagonists nd themselves collaborating with each other. The music, momentarily, negates their usual ideological interpolations. It allows a certain space to open up, one with potential political repercussions. But this is done only thanks to the pleasurable lure of an activity that is simply not political activity per se. And so likewise, could not musicology open up as-of-yet unforeseen political inscriptions between itself and the world by not insisting on its political outcome? Might not musicology, like the East/West Divan orchestra, be such a home? Is this not the reason why, contrary to Hoopers intimation of selfindulgence, many musicologists have made their lives much more complicated and displaced than they might have beenmoveable labor that we are? Have we not made the possibilities of home as normally understood more difcult precisely for the possibility of the home that the work itself provides? After all, if it is not too arrogant to make the following assumption, what probably got most of us into the profession of academic study of music in the rst place was not just music. Those who enter the profession for such a reason tend to leave when they realize that there is something else involved, even though that something, contrary to pro forma complaints of the moribund quality of scholarly pursuits in comparison with the force of life that is music itself, is far from unrelated to music or without life, as my discussion of dance, thought, and play hopefully showed. Unless one is just wasting ones time and was deluded enough to get into musicology for the money (why not be a lawyer, study for less time and make more money more quickly?); or, obscenely, one secretly hoped to use knowledge as a form of domination and selfaggrandizement (why not enter politics and dominate more brutally and with a bigger audience?); then the lure was most likely the possibility of a life oriented around the excitations produced from the activity in and of itself rather than with a life that was a means toward some other seless end, for the good of historical truth, or some such. At one time musicologists are exposed to a moment when life is play rather than work. And as the obsessive activity of artists attests, the picture that that invokes for us is of no life of indolence. For some, perhaps, this is a imsy icker of a thing to build a home around. Fair enough. There is no assertion here that the world would be a better place if everyone were an academic. However, there is the absolute insistence that this possibility in academia should be preservedbecause it is in precisely these kinds of places, in music, or in musicological play, that that which is not yet known might nd its home. As I suggested at the beginning of Part 2, there is an urgent need for certain musicological discourses to go more slowly with regard to the political
158. Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said, Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society (London: Bloomsbury, 2004), 11.
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values they circulate. At this particular moment, if musicological work does assert that it should politically justify itself, then it should probably take time out from the labor of linking its politics to musicological activity and labor to think through the politics themselves. That might indeed lead some toward accepting the full force of the political injunction, but that is a question of who gets productively caught up into what. After all, everyone ultimately has to choose their own dance. There is also a great urgency that we resist the temptation of too quickly inscribing what we deem to be the political validity of our work too far within the material itselfparticularly since what commonly constitutes political validity in the discipline no longer seems completely valid. At this moment, too overbearing a sense of certainty and identication with how a musicological project can function politically threatens to delimit severely what musicologists will let themselves see; through an overinsistence on telling us how we should respond, it may even circumscribe the possibility of being taken unawares by something in the music that might be politically more effective. Of course, at this historical moment, political work per se absolutely must convince us to sign up to what it claims it will achieve; it must show us a piece of equipment and tells us how it is to be used. The Democratic Partys failure to do this in 2004, for example, cost them the electionassuming, that is, that the voting equipment worked properly and they did not actually win. However, whether musicology should behave likewise now seems far from clear, and so perhaps, pace Hooper, we should interpret intimations of musicologys lack of political commitment positively rather than as an indulgence. In other words, we should nd in them signs of musicologys potential as a piece of equipment, radically variable, both at work and at play . . . like music, after all. Of course, musicology may just be a comfy cushion, and as we have seen, a cushion does not function particularly well as a sword. But it might work exceedingly well as a means of slowly suffocating an enemy.
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Abstract
For musicologists in the postmodern academy, the notion of context wields great force, both as a hermeneutic tool and as a meeting ground for a set of political beliefs that enable scholars to justify the meaning and relevance of their work. Primarily, this ideology is constituted by identity politics, the politics of difference and alterity, and the politics of locality and particularity. While acknowledging that musicological acts of cultural and historical contextualization per se are powerful means of illuminating cultural products, this essay nevertheless seeks, in its rst half, to raise a set of questions regarding the efcacy of the accompanying political ideology within the pervasively unstable and dialectically totalized world of the early twenty-rst century. Drawing extensively on the writings of the Slovenian cultural critic and theorist Slavoj iek and the French philosopher Alain Badiou, I argue that increasingly any localized context must be understood to be cut across by a kind of traumatic universalism that is, predominantly, economic in orientation. The second part of the essay, however, turns in a different direction and argues that the route out of musicologys present political contradictions may lie not so much in the project of attempting once more to synthesize musicological and political practices into one, but rather through afrming the import of two (both musicology and politics, and music and politics). Through recourse to three theoretical discourses (into Heidegger, Hegel, and aspects of the Marxist tradition), the essay revisits the notion of musical autonomy, rescripting itthrough an extensive analogy with danceinto a site where something unknown might manifest itself. Although it is acknowledged that this kind of site, strategically placed, might function effectively politically, it is nevertheless asserted that it is of sufcient import, in and of itself, to be preserved and nurtured, and that musicology in the academy is one of the privileged locations for where that might happen. Keywords: Slavoj iek; Alain Badiou; music and context; postmodern politics and music; negation, play, and dance

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Music After All Author(s): James Currie Source: Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 62, No.

Music After All

For Andrea Spain, who says yes (and so no)

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He concludes: Become like me and I will respect your difference.58

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135. Badiou, Century, 145.

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Journal of the American Musicological Society

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