Music, Lalangue, and the Real Unconscious (original) (raw)
Music and the Unconscious (Oxford 2015)
Roland Barthes says there are three different ways of listening. Listening as to an alert, listening as a deciphering, and listening that develops an inter-subjective space where what we listen to “is a general ‘signifying’ no longer conceivable without the determination of the unconscious.” Barthes does not spell out the implications of this observation for listening to music. I do.
Music and Non-Human Agency (2017)
Post, Jennifer (ed., 2018), Ethnomusicology – A Contemporary Reader, Volume II, pp. 181–194. NY & London: Routledge., 2018
A well-known definition of music states that what we understand with this term may be subsumed under "humanly organized sound:" This was formulated by John Blacking (1973, 3) in his celebrated book "How Musical is Man?" His proposal, however, was not uncontested, and many authors have tried to complement, contradict, or reaffirm this idea of how the phenomenon music could be framed. What is of interest here is the adverb "humanly," because it limits musical action and appreciation to processes that are essentially human, thereby excluding non-human agency. In this chapter, I will explore how far "the human" can be essentialized in relation to music and in which sense agency beyond the human could be, or even has to be, acknowledged within this context.
Zizek Studies, 2017
In answering the question “who is the subject of music,” we argue that it is a subject of excess and emergence and we rely on the definition and development of these terms by Žižek and Björk. Such a subject is movement and activity; exceeds the experiences, objects, others, and symbolic order that make it who it is; and emerges through desire and drive, and through resonance and animation. We open with a brief discussion of Žižek’s subject of excess, which we then relate to his approach to subjectivity in music. After an analysis of Björk’s music, centered on the piece “Black Lake” and from a perspective informed by Žižek’s account of subjectivity, we shift our attention to Björk’s thoughts on music in order to find elements that allow for the development of a subject of emergence. While the elements of excess and emergence are present in both accounts of the subject, Žižek’s and Björk’s respective focus on one of these concepts allow us to develop a fuller picture of subjectivity, particularly but not exclusively as it is engaged in musical activities.
Frontiers in Psychology, 2018
Music is at the centre of what it means to be human-it is the sounds of human bodies and minds moving in creative, story-making ways. We argue that music comes from the way in which knowing bodies (Merleau-Ponty) prospectively explore the environment using habitual 'patterns of action,' which we have identified as our innate 'communicative musicality.' To support our argument, we present short case studies of infant interactions using micro analyses of video and audio recordings to show the timings and shapes of intersubjective vocalizations and body movements of adult and child while they improvise shared narratives of meaning. Following a survey of the history of discoveries of infant abilities, we propose that the gestural narrative structures of voice and body seen as infants communicate with loving caregivers are the building blocks of what become particular cultural instances of the art of music, and of dance, theatre and other temporal arts. Children enter into a musical culture where their innate communicative musicality can be encouraged and strengthened through sensitive, respectful, playful, culturally informed teaching in companionship. The central importance of our abilities for music as part of what sustains our well-being is supported by evidence that communicative musicality strengthens emotions of social resilience to aid recovery from mental stress and illness. Drawing on the experience of the first author as a counsellor, we argue that the strength of one person's communicative musicality can support the vitality of another's through the application of skilful techniques that encourage an intimate, supportive, therapeutic, spirited companionship. Turning to brain science, we focus on hemispheric differences and the affective neuroscience of Jaak Panksepp. We emphasize that the psychobiological purpose of our innate musicality grows from the integrated rhythms of energy in the brain for prospective, sensationseeking affective guidance of vitality of movement. We conclude with a Coda that recalls the philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment, which built on the work of Heraclitus and Spinoza. This view places the shared experience of sensations of living-our communicative musicality-as inspiration for rules of logic formulated in symbols of language.
Music, Language, and Kinds of Consciousness
This paper was an indirect result of my attendance at a conference on music and consciousness organized by Eric Clarke and David Clarke at Sheffield University in 2006. Eric kindly asked if I would be interested in contributing something to the edited volume which came out of this conference, and although I didn't quite know what I would say about music and consciousness before that conference subsequent to it I had a somewhat better idea. That idea, around which this chapter is organized, is that musical experience can lead to a kind of consciousness rather different from those associated with language.
Current Musicology, 2001
Reviewed by Martin Scherzinger Introduction: A Historical Note Since the invention of aesthetics in the eighteenth century, philosophers have long taken music as a paradigm case for asserting a realm that is beyond the reach of linguistic signification and implicated instead in an ineffable higher truth about the workings of the world. Whether this interest took the form of Wackenroder's idealism (in which music occupied a pure angelic domain independent of the actual world), or Schopenhauer's endlessly striving Will (to which music bore the closest of all possible analogies), or Nietzsche's Dionysian strain (which represented the rapturous musical frenzy that destroyed the veils of maya and freed us from norms, images, rules and restraint), or Kierkegaard's analysis of the absolutely musical (which best exemplified the highly erotic striving of the pure un mediated life force), music has frequently served as a discursive site for speculation on the limits of philosophy, knowledge, and meaning. A central metaphor for that which resists epistemological certainty, music in philosophical discourse has functioned as a kind of discourse of the unimage, the non-significant, the unsayable par excellence. Less apparent, perhaps, today is the way that this kind of theorizing of fundamental negativity (which came out of German metaphysics) has impacted the current French philosophical, psychoanalytic and literarytheoretical scene. While the explicit reference to music has receded in most post-structuralist writings, the form of the inquiry has not changed much. Like the older figure of music, the operations of deconstruction, for example, mark what is semantically slippery, and puzzle the divide between hardened historical oppositions. Coming out of the Hegelian principle of non-identity, what counts as meaning in the deconstructive
The night, the music: a cognitive hypothesis
Revista Vórtex, 2020
In this article I present a discussion, based on cognitive psychology and on philosophy, about the application of the metaphor 'music as play,' instead of the metaphor 'music as language.' In it I try to distinguish what is properly biological in our hearing system from what is cultural, in order to emphasise, firstly, the hypothesis that music represents the creation of a territory of comfort where sounds are placed in places in which, according to the rules of a game, of a cognitive puzzle, they should be-a hypothesis that points to music as art; and, secondly, the idea that cognition of music may be understood as an enlarged auditory scene analysis, based on categorisation, rhythmicalization, and recursive schemes of sounds. This makes possible the building of a capacity to judge the rules of the game of music according to their latent potential and to their functionality; and, not least, to judge how well the creator "plays" the game, because in music (distinctly from the language) a conventional relationship with the world is superfluous, the rules are transmitted to those who attend by the very act of playing the game. As the specific context is not cultural, but that of the game itself, the determination of a great move in play does not depends on a class hegemony, but only on Kantian disinterest.