Music, Sensation, and Sensuality

Linda Phyllis Austern

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135689858
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Divided into three sections, Linda Phyllis Austern collects eighteen, cross-disciplinary essays written by some of the most important names in the field to look at this stimulating topic. The first section focuses on the cultural and scientific ways in which music and the sense of hearing work directly on the mind and body. Part Two investigates how music works on the socially constructed, representational or sexualized body as a means of healing, beautifying and maintaining a balance between the mental and physical. Finally, the book explores the action of music as it is heard and sensed by wider social units, such as the body politic, mass communication, from print to sound recording, and broadcast technologies.

Sensual Transgressions

4

Untying the Music/Language Knot

Elizabeth Tolbert

Communities of Collaboration

The postmodern attitude of irony and displacement draws our attention to various curious concepts about music implicit in Western discourses, among them its characterization as feminine, and therefore sensual, emotional, and bodily. As many scholars have pointed out, music is elided with the subordinate term in oppositions such as culture/nature, human/animal, mind/body, or reason/emotion.¹ Implicit in music’s feminization is its opposition to language, exhibiting qualities such as non-referentiality, syntax without semantics, pure form, the music “itself.” For example, Shepherd claims that timbre, music’s “tactile core,” has a feminizing influence because it lies outside of form.² Similarly, Barthes’s “grain of the voice” or Kristeva’s “geno-text” are the sensual aspects of vocality deemed separate from signification, ripe for assignation as feminine.³ These ideas about music have found fertile ground in post-Lacanian concepts of music as linked to the infantile, pre-symbolic, pre-Oedipal body, a body undifferentiated from the all-encompassing body and voice of the mother, and one that can exist as such only before entry into the fully Symbolic realm of language and its break with the materiality of sound.⁴

Yet these exalted affirmations of the “sonorous envelope”⁵ of the maternal voice and music’s attendant femininity cannot completely quell the suspicion that music has become the victim of logocentrism. As Dunn, among others, has pointed out:

… the theoretical identifications of music with a “mad” or “feminine” discourse, outside the structures of patriarchal signification, themselves remain firmly within those structures. In blurring the distinction between music and musical metaphor, they essentialize music itself; it becomes the discursive “other” through an act of linguistic appropriation.⁶

In light of this “linguistic appropriation,” it becomes clear that music’s feminization is not about music at all; it merely reinscribes the binary structures that affirm the dominance of language over music.⁷ Paradoxically, this use of music for logocentric aims is exposed by the fact that music cannot be fully contained within its feminization. When music is defined in reference to language, it becomes tinged with masculinity, as evidenced in its syntactical structure and its coziness with the utmost in pure reason, mathematics. This emphasis on syntactic structure in Western music valorizes music that is implicitly language-like and hence free of its feminine, “musical” attributes.⁸ Logocentric concepts of music thus uphold the hegemony of language, at least in part, by maintaining the hegemony of musics that disavow their emotional and sensual qualities.

Although much feminist ink has been spilt on critiques of logocentrism and their attendant binaries, and feminist musicologists have long noted the alliance of music and the feminine in both historical and contemporary discourses, perhaps underappreciated is the extent to which music so construed is inimical to these projects. The music/language dichotomy creates a music that is both harder to hear and more complexly imbricated in issues of representation than generally acknowledged. However, there are indications that ideologies of music and language are finally beginning to show signs of wear. Increasingly, scholars are refusing to capitulate to tired music/language dualisms. Abbate, for example, deliberately resuscitates a notion of musical presence despite Derridean critiques, optimistically proclaiming that “the trope of music as a language needs to be resisted. Music may thus escape philosophical critiques of language, perhaps even escape language entirely.”⁹ Tomlinson, in his intertextual readings of philosophies of subjectivity and their operatic manifestations, takes a different tack, proposing that our theoretical blind spot is the assumption that music is an expression of the Kantian noumenal. In the grip of post-Kantian subjectivity, contemporary Western subjects want music to be both present and beyond presence, both “music-like” and “language-like.” In the process, music has been pushed to the point where the illusion of the metaphysics of presence and the illusion of the noumenal are exposed, their interdependence only becoming visible in their threatened collapse.¹⁰

Abbate and Tomlinson, among others, offer provocative insights; however, it seems unlikely that music will be able to “escape the philosophical critiques of language” without further scrutiny of the “music” that upholds these critiques, or that “presence” will go away as a theoretical issue without acknowledgment of the bodily conditions of representation. In sympathy with these scholars, I suggest that an epistemological critique of contemporary ideas about music and language must begin with an awareness of their intellectual history, specifically, of their roots in Enlightenment discourses about human nature and the origins of human culture. As Europeans began to define themselves in opposition to Nature and non-Western Others, language became the defining characteristic of humanity, leaving music ambiguously positioned between the human and the non-human. Several authors have begun to chart the broad philosophical and historical trajectories that would place this emergent music/language ideology in a rich historical and sociocultural context. George Rousseau, in his interdisciplinary musings on premodern constructions of mind and body grounds contemporary understandings of mind/body dualisms in the Enlightenment, traces of which, by implication, surely inform contemporary understandings of music.¹¹ Thomas locates more precisely the specifically musical underpinnings of this history in eighteenth-century French writers such as Rousseau, who posited the origins of representation in the origins of music.¹²

Musicologists have also begun to place the feminization of music in specific contexts. Austern traces the emergence of music’s vacillating status between nature and culture in early modern England, in light of its feminization, opposition to language, and its place within “Natural Philosophy.”¹³ Similarly, Tomlinson’s readings of Derrida, although not engaging with the feminization of music per se, uncover logocentric assumptions in contemporary accounts of Aztec song, assumptions that have their roots in colonialist responses to Others.¹⁴ Although I cannot unravel these fascinating and complex histories here, there is enough evidence to suggest that contemporary Western discourses on music, language, and the origins of human culture not only have common roots in the intellectual traditions of the Enlightenment, but that they continue their intertextual dialogue across current disciplinary lines, even if only implicitly.

The principal task of this essay is to uncover veiled references to the feminization of music in contemporary humanistic and scientific discourses on representation and human origins. These covert allusions to a feminized music ideology, although seemingly peripheral to the theories of representation that invoke them, are actually a crucial component of these discussions, in that human nature continues to be defined in reference to a universal male subject who has recourse to language. Therefore, implicit in music’s feminization is not only its opposition and natural inferiority to language, but its opposition to the fully human. If music, no less than language, is among our few species-specific traits, then the lines imagined both between them and between human and non-human are especially relevant for an understanding of the role of “music” in the broader intellectual concerns of the Academy at large.

Before I go any further, I would like to issue a warning to the faint of heart. In bringing together Western academic discourses on music, language, and human origins, I have had to roam widely for collaborators, from Derrida to evolutionary psychologists, musicologists, linguists, neuroscientists, and feminist philosophers. My community of collaboration thus consists of scholars who in the flesh would cringe at my attempts to bring them together, and who would also probably not approve of my methodology, casting them sometimes as informants and other times as reliable authorities, depending on my purposes. For example, I will imagine the human/non-human divide in terms of the evolutionary body/mind, a body/mind not usually invoked within a humanistic context for fear of essentialist consequences. This bow toward the biological body is due to my conviction, along with a growing cadre of feminists such as Grosz, Wilson, and Kirby, that the elevation of the constructed body merely essentializes the culture half of the nature/culture dichotomy, and leaves us conceptually with a reinscription of the very dichotomy we wish to undo.¹⁵ Therefore, the body invoked here is specifically not the textualized body of much current critical theory, but rather one that encompasses the perceptual and cognitive and evolutionary body, a sensate embodiment that extends Merleau-Pontys insight that the body is not an object per se, but rather “our point of view on the world.”¹⁶ The constructedness of categories such as “music” and “language” is inextricably tied to our bodily capabilities to construct these categories, and therefore it makes sense to know as much as possible about these human capabilities, how they evolved, and the stories we tell ourselves about our “human nature.” This knowledge is not easy to come by, however, because my collaborators do not speak to one another; indeed, they encroach on each other’s territory in rather threatening ways, attempting to subsume each other into their own “master” discourses. The only way to weave among them is to show where they already intersect and to go from there.

The Mythological Origin

Derrida, with characteristic wit and obfuscation, points us to the trouble spot between music and language in his by now oft-quoted passages in Of Grammatology concerning Ro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Series Editor’s Foreword
• Introduction
• Minding Affect
• Sensual Transgressions
• Transcendence
• Video (I See)
• Representation Touching Hearing
• Noise and Science
• Index