Baruch Spinoza and the Matter of Music: Toward a New By Amy Cimini

Baruch Spinoza and the Matter of Music: Toward a New Practice of Theorizing Musical Bodies

By Amy Cimini

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Music New York University September, 2011

__________________ Advisor: Jairo Moreno

UMI Number: 3482865

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In the context of project that takes the joy immanent to the production of knowledge as one of its primary themes, it is an overwhelming task to thank all of the people who have helped coax this project to fruition. I am deeply grateful to my committee, Professors Stanley Boorman, Michael Beckerman, Suzanne G. Cusick, Don Garrett and Jairo Moreno for working and thinking with me as this project draws to one sort of a close. I am deeply grateful to Jairo Moreno for what has now been six years of unflagging guidance, thoughtful critique and intellectual inspiration. I also want to thank the NYU music department – our administrators, faculty and graduate students – for fostering a culture of creative thought and rich collegiality. Finally, I am deeply grateful to the remarkable people who have been part of this long journey in both intellectual and musical ways. Thank you to: Andrew Burgard, Audrey, Megan & David Cimini, Rachel Corkle, Erica Dicker, Denise Gill-Gürtan, Michael Gallope, Seth Garrison, Daniel Hoffman-Schwartz, Brian Hulse, Jenny Olivia Johnson, Nisha Kunte, Felipe Lara, Clara Latham, Emily Manzo, Matt Marlin, Alex Ness, Katherine Preston, Jessica Schwartz, Tes Slominksi, Stephen Smith, Ben Tausig, Katherine Young, Emily Wilbourne and Erica Weitzman.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS ACNOWLEDGEMENTS

ii

LIST OF FIGURES

vi

INTRODUCTION

1

0.0 Dualism and its Critical Milieu

3

0.1 Challenges and Open-Ended Questions

6

0.2 Organization

7

0.3 Biographical Appendix

12

CHAPTER 1

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How to Do Things With Dualism: The Political Expedience of the Musical MindBody Problem 1.0 Introduction

20

1.1 Substantial and Desubstantial Bodies

25

1.2 The “New” Musicological Body

35

1.3 Vibration, Difference and the Force of Sonic Relationality

53

1.4 Immanuel Kant and the Challenge of Open Ear: The Critique of Judgment (1790) and Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798)

58

1.5 Hearing the Flesh of the World: Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Intertwining – The Chiasm (1961)

62

1.6 Hearing-Oneself-Speak and Lending an Ear: Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy and Peter Szendy (1968-2007)

70

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1.7 Conclusion

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CHAPTER 2

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Descartes’ Musical Secret and The Cartesian Art of Defending MindBody Dualism 2.0 Introduction

80

2.1 Contextualizing the Compendium (1618)

83

2.2 Isaac Beeckman and the Early Mathematization of the World: 16181619)

92

2.3 Dualism and Rational Love

98

2.4 Sonic Materiality and Mathematical Pleasures: The Crypto-Dualism of Descartes’ Compendium

106

2.5 Rules for the Direction of the Ear: Epistemological Certainty and the Deductive Cartesian Listener

115

2.6 The Cogito and the Production of the “Mind’s Eye:” Thought and Visuality Between the Meditations and the Optics

119

2.7 Mind and Body: Really Distinct and Substantially United

132

2.8 Conclusion: Music, the Third Notion and the Mind-Body Union

140

CHAPTER THREE

145

Spinoza’s Substance and Matters of Expression 3.0 Introduction and New Provocations

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145

3.1 Deus sive natura: A New Substantiality

148

3.2 A Musical Spinoza?

154

3.3 What Can A Body Do?

158

3.4 Motion and Rest

164

3.5 Matters of Expression

170

3.6 Expressive Materialities and Drastic Knowledge

181

3.7 The Challenge of Instrumentalization

185

3.8 Conclusions and New Questions

188

CHAPTER FOUR

191

“A Visceral Attachment to Life:” Rational Joy and the Ethics of Musical Bodies 4.0 Introduction, or Expressive Ears

191

4.1 The Mind-Body Union

195

4.2 Common Notions

201

4.3 What can a Mind Do?

208

4.4 Thinking, Listening, Speed

220

4.5 Intralayering “Analysis:” Naomi Cumming, Jacques Lacan and Steve Reich’s Different Trains (1988)

226

4.6 An Ethics of Joy

234

4.7 Conclusions and Refigurations

239

CONCLUSION

244

WORKS CITED

249

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LIST OF FIGURES Fig. 1

Vijay Iyer’s Analysis of Time and Bodily Motion

Fig. 2

Arithmetic Proportions

109

Fig. 3

Geometric Proportions

109

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Introduction

0.0 Initial Provocations

This project arises from an abiding interest in musical bodies. I have cultivated this interest – my interest – through performance practice, informal socialization and formal research, self-consciously holding the premium that music studies seems to place on musical bodies and the category of embodied knowledge at varying degrees of distance. Why? The notion that musical sound is made by bodies and circulates within and among bodies has nearly become axiomatic in music studies. And yet, precisely because this claim has become axiomatic, what is challenging about analyzing and theorizing the body – the material and fleshly thing through which we carry out our musical activities no less than our everyday lives – sometimes recedes into the background. The materiality of bodies can be opaque and inaccessible – describing what it’s “like” to inhabit a particular musical idiom is as wildly subjective as it is crucial for music discourse. That materiality is also the stuff of a dangerous essentialism – the reduction of bodies to pure matter lies at the core of a great deal of 20th and 21st century violence. And yet, at the same time, bodies are sites of socialization and thus loci for the production of pleasure, sensuality and identity (understood along many axes). Musical bodies, it seems, are everywhere and nowhere

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– they are both inaccessible and all-too accessible – they are highly autonomous, but also socially shared – they are made of solid and physical stuff, but they are also modified through discourse and practice. This network of coexistent contradictions creates a rich and dynamic conceptual field for thinking about musical bodies. And thus, this project could unfold in many ways. I could undertake a historical study of musical pleasure and dance in René Descartes music historical milieu. I could embark on an auto-ethnographic study of how I think I’ve participated in the production of community and musical meaning in and through my own performance history and practice. I could undertake a biopolitical study of the immanent production of social order through musical habit and affect (indeed, it is this latter direction that I see this project moving in the future). And yet, for now, this project is none of these things. Rather, it takes the challenges that surround thinking the material body as an injunction towards the intellectual history of the mind-body problem. Here, I examine a philosophical perspective that I think can comprehend and enrich the “coexistent contradictions” I enumerate above: the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677). Spinoza’s robust account of freedom and determination, bodily activity and its correlate in thought, expression and its projection onto/as social life offer a compelling account of both the constitution and potential transformation immanent to bodily materiality. While this project is a very much a theoretical reflection, it has also grown out of my own embodied musical experience. As a violist committed to 20th and 21st century

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avant-garde and experimental practices, I often wondered what it “meant” that I was challenging my body to inhabit the extended techniques these idioms required. What did it mean, for example, that a certain technique might be painful, or at least reliably uncomfortable? Did the fact of this challenge come across in sound? Did that matter? And in either case, what kind of social relationships (if any) would executing this music well make possible? The more I reflected on these questions and pursued them in conversation with collaborators and friends, it became clear that whatever their answers were, I could not access them in splendid isolation or through untheorized encounters with others. These questions were of a social and a theoretical order. Rather than draw focus inward toward the details of my musical practice, I wanted to project focus outward towards how and to what ends its results were socially transmissible. What I wanted, I know now, was a flexible and pliable frame for understanding music’s effects on bodies and bodies’ effects on music.

0.1 Dualism and its Critical Milieu

The strong argument of this project is that music studies’ concerted effort to recuperate the body as a site of research and meaning production in the 1990s was produced through a silent dialogue with philosophical accounts of the mind-body union of the 17th century. This took shape as a polemical opposition to René Descartes’ notorious dualism and his reduction of the thinking/acting subject to the

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immaterial cogito. Music studies rejected dualism’s famous denigration of the body, but retained its purportedly antagonistic relation between the mind and body in order to posit the body as a resistive site for a progressive ethics and politics both within and beyond the scope of scholarship. I call music studies engagement with dualism a moral critique precisely because it upends dualism’s values, but retains its combative structure as a political expedient. Thinking about this focus on the body as interdependent or consubstantial with the intellectual history of theorizing of the mind-body union, however, creates a broader critical milieu for the dualism that music studies so powerfully vilifies. Beyond the cogito’s separation of the subject from her body, the mind-body problem entails a network of questions about whether the mind and body are separate things at all, how they interact and what makes introspection possible.1 Descartes’ contemporaries were less concerned with the body’s contingent role in the constitution of the subject than the question of how the mind and body interact in the first place. Reconstituting the mind-body union from the perspective of interaction yields much different results than moral critique. So, rather than bequeath to modernity a limited and limiting view of the human being vis-à-vis Descartes, this Spinozistic moment in early modernity posits a reconstituted version of the human being as a radical alternative to what will later be

1

Antonio Damasio. Looking For Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow and the Feeling Brain. Orlando: Harcourt, 2003, 184.

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called the dialectic of Enlightenment.2 In light of such an alternative, I ask how might music studies’ orientation toward the body change if its centrality in the field were focused on the Cartesian problem of interaction over the problem of contingent unity? Baruch Spinoza’s critique of Descartes is a focal point in the critical milieu in which I place music studies’ dualism. By engaging dualism through the problem of mind-body interaction, Spinoza also resolves the problematic contingency of Cartesian mind-body union. While Spinoza offers a robust account for how the actions of the body constitute mental knowledge, a refusal to prescribe in advance what a body can do becomes the cornerstone of his ethics. This conception of bodies rests not on a notion of “the body as such” but on a theorization of bodies that crisscrosses the human and the nonhuman, the organic and inorganic and the natural and cultural. Spinoza offers much in the way of thinking music as a force of socialization, but the same time demands a rethinking of the social on the basis of his

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An earlier conception of the project aimed to trace the intellectual history of the Spinozistic radical Enlightenement through the enchanted materialism of Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond D’Alembert, ultimately positing a Spinozistic reading of the corps sonore in Jean-Phillipe Rameau’s late musical thought. While my expanded focus on Descartes’ musical thought, and contemporary musical bodies more generally has postponed that research, I do align this project with other thinkers who distinguish between a moderate Cartesian Enlightenment and a radical Spinozistic Enlightenment. Jonathan Israel’s monumental Radical Enlightenment is a signal text in historicizing this distinction. Jonathan I. Israel. Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650-1750. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri also locate the origins of a radical strand of immanent democracy in Spinoza’s political thought which they mobilize in order to address global democracy in our historical moment. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000; Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: Penguin, 2004. 5

resolution of Descartes’ mind-body problem. Here is an outline of some fundamental conclusions this project throws into relief by recasting music studies’ engagement with the body in a specifically Spinozistic way.

1. All knowledge has a bodily correlate, and thus there is no principled distinction between “embodied” knowledge and other ways of knowing 2. The body becomes a site for ethical modification not political expedience. That modification is an immanently social practice. 3. “Expression” becomes a form of insight into the structure of bodies’ interaction. 4. That insight produces a form of rationality that is at the same time “joyful,” effacing a separation between thought and affect. This effacement recasts distinctions between analytic, hermeneutic and archival knowledge and “embodied” knowledge based on listening and performance.

So, the “flexible” account of musical bodies I mentioned above now takes shape as an examination of how bodies transmit knowledge without reserving a special way of knowing through the body alone. This perspective redirects focus from the individual to the cooperation of bodies, thus projecting questions about the bodies’ production of “meaning” into the register of affect and sociality.

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0.2 Challenges and Open-Ended Questions

The primary challenge to this project, as I see it, is why philosophy? This is an interdisciplinary project grounded on primary texts in early modern thought and buttressed with wide reading in political theory, the music fields, the history of philosophy, anthropology and performance studies. I do not practice (nor am I trained in) properly philosophical methods of analysis and critique, although I do draw on texts from across the so-called “Analytic” and “Continental” traditions. The complex network of bodies with which I opened the introduction is circumscribed by a broader disciplinary injunction to look to the body as such for music’s social grounding. In Chapter 1, I show that this injunction is broadly Cartesian in structure, and thus it is always-already philosophical in a broad sense. To the extent that Descartes haunts music studies’ (and other fields’) engagement with the body, philosophy and its history lie implicitly or explicitly at the core of that engagement. I argue that making that centrality both explicit and explicitly philosophical, broadens theoretical resources for thinking about bodies, while prompting greater reflective latitude with respect to what, exactly, prioritizing the body in music studies assumes bodies can do. This is not a truth-telling gambit aimed at instructing the field in what musical bodies really are or how musical bodies really produce meaning, but instead a means of reframing the musical body without the vestiges of Cartesian dualism. Philosophy, in this project, is not an end unto itself.

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Rather, as a means of theoretically situating the many contradictory challenges of thinking musical bodies, I leave the ends – a tailoring of these theoretical wagers to the specificity of particular situations – open in a way that I hope demonstrates their generative and flexible formation.

0.3 Organization

I have organized this dissertation as precisely the expanded intellectual historical and critical milieu for dualism that I outline above. Thus, the project stages a number of encounters between different historical instantiations of both dualism and Spinozism in order to wager a particularly musical perspective on 17th century debates about the mind-body union.

Chapter 1 How to Do Things With Dualism: The Political Expedience of the Musical MindBody Problem. This chapter lays the groundwork for my expanded look at the mind-body problem by unearthing what I call a crypto-dualism in some of music studies’ more forceful injunctions to the body; this includes Ruth Solie’s Music and Difference, Susan McClary’s Feminine Endings, Suzanne Cusick’s “Feminist Theory/Music Theory and the Mind/Body Problem” and Carolyn Abbate’s “Music !Drastic or Gnostic?,” a

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polemical and deeply influential article from 2004, in many ways a manifesto for a renewed attention to the mind-body problem in musicology. This is a crypto-dualism insofar as it retains dualism’s antagonistic structure while repudiating its values in order to posit the body as a source of irreducible knowledge and socio-political disruption. Two questions emerge from this reversal. One: without an account of mind-body interaction, on what grounds can embodied musical activities generate irreducible knowledge? And two: how do musical bodies enact this disruptive power? The first question makes way for a Spinoizistic intervention, and the second prompts a re-reading of Descartes. Talking about the materiality of sound – as vibration, as particles or as an invisible yet haptic presence – is nearly as difficult as talking about musical bodies. And yet, how sound is said to act upon the body often grounds what we understand musical bodies to be capable of. Normative historical divisions of the senses typically allocate agency and directionality to vision, and immersion and passivity to hearing/listening – which presumes not only how sound acts upon individual bodies, but also how sound’s action upon bodies constitutes a form of relationality. A set of diverse case studies (Immanuel Kant, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-Luc Nancy) reveals a polarized view of sound’s immediacy: at once, it marks an irreducible openness to one another, and at the same time, closes us against difference. Spinoza’s understanding of materiality offers a compelling alternative. Chapter 2

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Descartes’ Musical Secret and the Art of Defending Mind-Body Dualism This chapter transposes the contemporary conjunction of music and dualism outlined in Chapter 1 onto Descartes’ philosophical corpus. How? By investigating Descartes’ first complete manuscript – his 1618 Compendium of Music (pub. pth. 1650) – this chapter assesses how Descartes’ early interest in music and sound impacts his mature formulation of dualism through the cogito. This chapter emplaces the problem of music, sound and the body within the Cartesian corpus, not as its antagonistic other in the manner of the “new” musicology. Although the Descartes of the Compendium breaks with the then still-powerful correspondences of musica universalis, the text bears vestiges of both early modern empiricism and Renaissance cosmology. By tracing these conflicting orientations, I show that Descartes’ tense situation of musical pleasure at the threshold of the body and soul constitutes a very early intimation of his mature dualism. Ultimately, however, music and sound will be excluded from the cogito’s guarantee of certainty – and, importantly, the social stability that certainty makes possible. Why? Our experience of music is just too subjective, Descartes explains in a letter to Marin Mersenne in 1630. Visual art is another matter. In both the Meditations and Optics, Descartes uses visual representation to instruct the thinker in what is and is not internal to the medium of thought, thus using visual art to establish the distinction between mind and body that constitutes his dualism. Cartesian thought is visual

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through and through, marking an important moment in the suturing of visuality to agency and truth in the history of the senses. And yet, we know that Descartes’ dualism has many problems. By examining Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia’s celebrated critique of Descartes conception of mind-body interaction, I reanimate the question of music’s role in Descartes’ dualism, rethinking and recontextualizing its conflicted place in the Compendium: at the threshold of the body and the soul. Chapter 3 Spinoza’s Substance and Matters of Expression This chapter makes a decisive intervention in the critical milieu that is now taking shape. What have until this point been two independent substances (mind and body) become for Spinoza two attributes of a single substance – this is Spinoza’s substance monism. Monism has radical implications for musical bodies in that it proposes a univocal understanding of performing and listening bodies and the wide network of material with which they interact. I explicate that univocity through the action of expression which is essential to Gilles Deleuze’s understanding of Spinoza and his later treatment of music and art in “Of the Refrain,” written with Felix Guattari. Spinozistic-Deleuzian expression isn’t copacetic with the more intuitive understanding of expression as an externalization of an inner wish, desire or opinion. Rather, this expression describes the dynamic and productive action by which those things are brought into being. Musical expression draws attention to the very material

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of which sounds (and bodies…and instruments) are made, analyzing them in terms of their variable capacities. Expression erodes the dualistic allocation of passivity to the body and activity to the mind and the related allocation of passivity to the ear and activity to the mind, thus reconfiguring the polarized approach to sonic relationality that I laid out in Chapter 1. Chapter Four “A Visceral Attachment to Life:” Rational Joy and the Ethics of Musical Bodies This chapter brings some of the more radical possibilities of this project into sharp focus. That is, by offering a robust explication of Spinoza’s reconfiguration of Descartes’ dualism, this chapter rethinks the category of embodied musical knowledge (an important keyword throughout this project) through the process of expression outlined in Chapter 3. Spinoza’s theory of knowledge not only posits all knowledge as to some degree embodied, it also imbues rational knowledge with an affective valence: joy is immanent to rationality. This joy forms the foundation of a rational sociability grounded in the parallel production of knowledge and bodily action. I conclude this dissertation by exploring how this joyful understanding of knowledge might be brought to bear on once-polemicized distinctions between analytic, hermeneutic and archival knowledge and embodied musical experience. 0.4 Biographical Appendix

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Even a cursory look at Spinoza’s life reveals a thinker whose philosophical commitment to “joy, friendship and sociability” stands in stark contrast with his personal experience and historical milieu.3 Spinoza was born into a reasonably wellto-do merchant family in 1632, in the Sephardic Marrano Jewish community in Amsterdam.4 “Marranos” were Spanish and Portuguese Jews who had been forcibly converted to Christianity under the manifold threats of the Spanish Inquisition. Amsterdam became an important haven for Jews fleeing intolerable conditions on Iberian peninsula. Spinoza’s father Michael had arrived to Amsterdam from Portugal (via Nantes) around 1623 and he was a member of the Marrano community’s governing parnassim.5 Michael died in 1654 (Spinoza’s mother had died in 1638) and so by early adulthood only Spinoza and his brother Gabriel remained. The two brothers formed an importing business shortly after their father’s death.6 Spinoza’s own intellectual potential was noted early in education at community’s Talmud Torah school, although his education there ended at age 14. And yet, Spinoza pursued tremendous erudition elsewhere, becoming something of an autodidact and polymath. He knew Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, Hebrew and Latin. He learned the latter at the Latin school of former Jesuit medical doctor and known atheist Franciscus Van den Enden, where also studied Hobbes, Machiavelli and ancient philosophy.7

3

Steven B. Smith. Spinoza’s Book of Life: Freedom and Redemption in the Ethics. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003, 4. 4 Smith, xix. 5 Ibid, xix. 6 Ibid., xix. 7 Ibid., xx. 13

As a result of the Dutch Republic’s then-unique guarantee of religious freedom, Amsterdam became an important destination for Iberian Jews fleeing the Inquisition.8 As a trade center (much of which Spinoza’s community was involved in), Spinoza’s Amsterdam was markedly cosmopolitan. Because the Amsterdam Sephardim were former conversos (Jews who had outwardly practiced Catholicism), Deleuze explains, the religious beliefs of the community were quite heterogeneous. He tells us, “even those sincerely attached to their faith are imbued with a philosophical, scientific and medical culture that cannot easily be reconciled with traditional Rabbinical Judaism.”9 While Deleuze’s explication implies a latitude of free-thinking in Spinoza’s community, Stephen Nadler argues that precisely this diversity of belief amongst “Jews recently returned to the fold” required the community to use “robust sanctions” to instruct its members in basic laws and lessons. Nadler also speculates that cultivating religious order was important for the Amsterdam Marranos’ security in the Dutch state insofar as maintaining internal order constituted a demonstration of

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Article 13 of The Union of Utrect (1579) mandated that, “every individual shall remain free in his religion and no one should be molested or questioned on the subject of divine worship.” (Nadler 8) The influx of Spanish and Portuguese Jews would not begin until the early 17th century and although the framers of Article 13 “seem not to have considered the possibility that it would someday have to accommodate Jews” Dutch law mandated that Amsterdam’s Sephardic Jewish community be permitted to practice Judaism openly. Stephen Nadler, Spinoza’s Heresy: Immortality and the Jewish Mind. Oxford: Clarendon, 2001, 8. 9 Gilles Deleuze. Practical Philosophy: Spinoza. San Francisco: City Lights, 1988, 5. 14

respect for the state’s stability more broadly.10 In any case, this practice has serious consequences for Spinoza. With perhaps of the harshest writs of expulsion issued by his community, Spinoza was banned from the Amsterdam Sephardim in 1656, although the rationale behind the ban is in no way clear.11 Known in his community as a cherem, this ban is not only religious but also economic and political; it proscribes Spinoza from religious practice and prohibits community members to trade or socialize with him. After the cherem, Spinoza traded his Hebrew first name “Baruch” (meaning “blessed”) to its Latin relative, Benedict. Debates rage about why Spinoza might have been banned. W.N.A. Klever points out that Spinoza’s studies with Van den Enden (which he may have begun before his father’s death in 1654 and continued through 1658) would no doubt have made religious authorities uncomfortable.12 Early in 1656, Spinoza stopped paying community taxes, although it is not clearly whether that is a result of a decline in business or a sign that he had already drifted from the community and its customs.13 Regardless, the text of the cherem charges Spinoza with “evil opinions” and “monstrous acts” priori to him having published any philosophical work, implying that his processual “secularization” was well known perhaps years before the cherem was issued.14 Contesting the common misconception that Spinoza lived his post-cherem 10

Nadler, 9. Nadler, 2. 12 W.N.A. Klever. “Spinoza’s Life and Works.” In Cambridge Companion to Spinoza. Ed. Don Garrett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, 17. 13 Klever, 16. 14 Nadler, 12. 11

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life in solitude, Nadler points out that Spinoza developed relationships with Christians, Collegiants and Mennonites through shared interests in pacifism and pantheistic communism.15 As Deleuze accounts, “one can think that Spinoza was naturally drawn to the most tolerant circles, those most apt to welcome and excommunicated Jew who rejected Christianity no less than the Judaism to which he was born, and owed his break with the latter to himself alone.”16 He attracted a small, sympathetic “study group” with whom he circulated letters and drafts in secret during the 1660s, that included Henry Oldenburg (Secretary of the Royal Academy of Science), Jarig Jelles, Peter Balling and Simon de Vries. Many scholars cite Spinoza’s early theory of democracy in his Theological Political Treatise (1670) as an important locus for his anachronistic contemporaneity. 17

This commitment to democracy also grounded Spinoza’s post-cherem relation to the

Dutch state. Spinoza’s republican political leanings aligned him with the Dutch liberal republican party of Jan DeWitt, who had been in power since 1654. Spinoza’s support for DeWitt opposed him to the competing House of Orange, against the Amsterdam Marranos’ propensity to support the House because of abiding hatred of Spain. With the invasion of French and German armies in 1672, De Witt’s republican state was overthrown (and De Witt assassinated), resulting in the reinstatement of the House of

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Deleuze, 6. Deleuze, 7. 17 Hardt & Negri. Empire; Hardt & Negri. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire; Etienne Balibar. Spinoza and Politics. New York: Verso, 2002. 16

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Orange.18 Indeed, as Deleuze points out, De Witt had offered Spinoza some degree of intellectual and political protection while Spinoza’s radical and purportedly atheistic thought became increasingly well known. Prior to De Witt’s assassination, Spinoza had (anonymously) published his Theological Political Treatise in 1670, in which he defends freedom of speech, freedom of religion and posits democracy as the political system closest to man’s natural, rational state. Although Spinoza may have hoped for a thoughtful reception from free thinkers and liberal philosophers, the Treatise was variously attacked as an atheistic, vile, harmful and sacreligious – and as a result, Deleuze tell us, “the words Spinozism and Spinozist became insults and threats.”19 As a reminder that the circulation of his ideas was in many ways a matter of life and death, Spinoza had only to recall the tragic case of fellow van Enden acolyte Adriaen Koerbagh. Adriaen and his brother Johannes, both well-acquainted with Spinoza’s ideas, were tried in Amsterdam for the circulation of atheistic and Spinozistic ideas “in plain Dutch.”20 Exhausted and broken after two years of investigation and interrogation, Adriaen died in prison in 1669. Spinoza died in 1677 from a pulmonary disease contracted by inhaling glass fragments while grinding lenses, which is how he made his living after the cherem.21 Spinoza’s philosophical output was small, but polarizing. His range of influences was 18

Klever, 40. Deleuze, 10. 20 Klever, 41; Jonathan I. Israel. Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650-1750. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, 184-196. 21 Spinoza was quite well known for his expertise as a lens grinder. Christiaan Huygens, another researcher in the realm of optics, was allegedly jealous of his skill and the two were careful to keep their research from one another. Smith, xxiii. 19

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also eclectic, ranging from Judeo-Islamist thought (Maimonides and Gersonides) Stoic and Aristotelian thought and, of course, Descartes.22 The only work he published in his own name during his lifetime was a geometrical exposition of Descartes’ Principles of Philosophy and he did so at the urging of his friend Lodewijk Meyer. The Principles was the result of his private tutoring work with a student from the University of Leiden and it marked the beginning and end of his professorial work.23 And yet, on the strength of this single text, Spinoza was offered a professorship at the prestigious University of Heidelberg in 1673, which he declined in the name of “freedom to philosophize.”24 A “forerunner of the Ethics,” the Short Treatise on God, Man and his Well-Being was discovered and published in the 19th century and two other short texts (Political Treatise and Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect) were also published by friends after Spinoza’s death.25 He also worked on a Compendium of Hebrew Grammar – “an unfinished but quite voluminous work” – which was published in the Opera Posthuma.26 He began the Ethics, his magnum opus, as early as 1661, but suspended work on the text in 1665 to draft the Theological-Political Treatise. After publishing the Treatise anonymously in 1670, Spinoza completed the Ethics, but reserved it for posthumous publication.

22

Moira Gatens. “Introduction.” Feminist Interpretations of Benedict Spinoza. Ed. Moira Gatens. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009, 4. 23 Klever, 29. 24 Israel, 32. 25 Klever, 13. 26 Klever, 32. 18

Although reading the Ethics and the Theological Political Treatise together as an integrated whole may be one of the long-term goals of this project, in this text, I focus almost exclusively on the Ethics. Insofar as this project is motivated by an abiding interest in musical bodies, I prioritize the Ethics because that is where Spinoza explicates his theory of the mind-body union. Written as a series of axiomatic proof in the geometric method, the Ethics is forbidding. 27 Inspired by Euclid’s Elements, it seems at once “majestically impersonal” in the words of Stuart Hampshire and deeply infused with a crystalline, systematic energy.28 The text is divided into five parts: “Of God,” “Of the Mind,” “Of the Affects,” “Of Human Bondage” and “Of Human Freedom.” First, Spinoza outlines a radically un-anthropomorphic conception of God that doubles as a reconfiguration of Cartesian substance. Bringing this refiguration to bear on the mind-body union, Spinoza explains how the body’s constitutive relation to the mind supports an ethical and epistemological program aimed at the production of social joy, active affects and adequate knowledge.

Posting that joy as the endpoint of the project – and in many ways, as the affective orientation with which this project has been carried out – I begin now with musical bodies.

27 28

Smith, 9. Stuart Hampshire. Spinoza. New York: Penguin, 1952, 24; cited in Smith, 9. 19

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Chapter One How to Do Things with Dualism: The Political Expedience of the Musical Mind-Body Problem

1.0 Introduction

Embodiment, carnality, hexis, intercorporeality, sentient corporeality, materiality…this collection of multivalent terms represents some of the many concepts under which music studies’ commitment to the body has taken shape over the last thirty years. Through this commitment, typically associated with the “New” (or, “Critical,” or, “Cultural”) Musicology, “the body” came to signify a wide swath of new critical projects that encompassed the analysis of the production of difference in musical experience, music’s role in the production and regulation of desire and other forms of politically progressive critique. Placing the body within the scope of musicological research became concomitant – and synonymous – with an (at times) polarizing commitment to self-reflexive critique and political engagement. René Descartes’ notorious mind-body dualism lies at the core of this tightly concentric list of progressive practices that the “New” Musicology ascribes to the body. As is well known, the Cartesian human being is composed of two substances: the immaterial mind and the material body. The Cartesian subject affirms her existence through the Godlike

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cogito; (at best, the body has no part in the production of knowledge and, at worst, it proffers deceitful knowledge through the senses. The Cartesian body’s epistemological threat is at the same time a moral threat in the sense that actions based on dubitable information will be suspect in their motivations. Mapping dualism’s denigration of the body onto a parallel denigration of embodied listening and performance, music studies identifies dualism as a disciplinary, moral and political problem. Taking arms against dualism’s epistemological and moral indictments, music studies sets two principles in place. One: the body is an ineluctable site for the production of knowledge. And two: the body’s actions form the very ground of progressive social and political life. I want to temporarily sideline this moral critique in order to reveal an important philosophical problem at the core of Descartes’ dualism. This approach puts two questions to the conjunction of the immaterial and the material substances of which Descartes would have us believe we are composed. One: how are the immaterial mind and the material body united if, indeed, these substances are independent of one another? And two: how can an immaterial thing act on, or control, a material thing? As I show throughout this project, rethinking dualism through the question of interaction, and not its moral prescriptions, yields a very different view of what minds and bodies can do. In rendering forth those differences, I distinguish between music studies’ moral approach to dualism and an approach I will call both ethical and Spinozistic. The moral approach seeks redress for dualism’s denigration of the body by stabilizing

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a disciplinary program that affirms its progressive capacities. The ethical approach, however, understands the body’s value to the human subject as immanent to the bodies’ actions and activities. In Chapters 3 and 4, I explicate the ontological basis for this progressive ethics. By what is this “body” whose moral and ethical character I’ll be examining? The theoretical vocabulary that surrounds the body in humanistic and social scientific discourse is complex and nuanced. While “materiality,” in some cases captures the very physical facticity of the body (the sheer weight of its limbs, its need for sleep and nourishment, how far in the distance we can see, what frequencies we can hear), that materiality circumscribes out capacity to perceive and conceptualize the world.29 Indeed, the distinction between materiality and embodiment is complex, and the matter/materiality/materialization nexus is itself highly fraught. The broad-shouldered concept of embodiment describes how the body’s material features (and variegated capacities) “play a role in our subjective sense of self.”30 How, for example, does our social, political and cultural experience produce the body as a contextual materiality whose actions and capacities are brokered through and made intelligible within a given milieu? Under what conditions is this contextuality occluded or forced into relief and how is our sense of self constructed in and through such disclosures?

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http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminist-body/. This interest in weightiness comes from Nancy Mair’s critique of Butler’s concept of materialization. Working in the context of disability studies, Mairs wants a more robust theory of how the intractable physicality of the body constitutes constraints and possbilities for thinking. 30 Ibid. 23

Thinking of embodiment as contextual materiality posits a generative chiasmus: on the one hand, the body mediates and conditions our understanding of the world, and one the other, the world mediates and condition our understanding of the body. This double movement, and our interventions upon it, constitute an embodied knowledge that is both a form of self-knowledge and a form of knowledge about the complex social, cultural and political milieu in which we operate. Vijay Iyer’s concept of hexis (doubly borrowed from Bourdieu and Aristotle) analyzes how performers’ “comportment in the moment” constitutes a pattern of habits that is socially inculcated.31 Iyer’s hexis bears the traces of Iris Marion Young’s canonical phenomenological investigation of how ‘bodily comportment’ reveals the extent to which social norms operate at the level of pre-reflective experience.32 Both cases posit embodied knowledge as an admixture of materiality and sociality. Elizabeth LeGuin offers a genealogy of embodiment tailored to her interest in carnality, tracing the term to the Greek kinesthesia: “that faculty of which the soul is informed of the state of the body, which occurs by means of the nerves generally

31

Vijay Iyer, in interview with Ars Nova Workshop. http://arsnovaworkshop.org/node/559, Accessed 7/14/2011. Keith M. Murphy and C. Jason Throop. “Bourdieu and Phenomenology: A Critical Assessment.” In Anthropological Theory. London, 2002. Vol. 2, No., 2, 185-207: 188. 32 Iris Marion Young. On Female Body Experience: “Throwing Like a Girl” and Other Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

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distributed throughout the body.”33 Bracketing the social situatedness of embodiment understood as contextual materiality, LeGuin’s definition seems to describe an intimate, almost spiritual sense of being “in” the body. The very notion of carnality invokes Judeo-Christian concepts of fleshly incarnation, a double action by which the soul takes on flesh, while the flesh is sanctified by the soul’s living presence. 34 Mobilizing this genealogy, LeGuin’s carnality ascribes a nearly-mystical valence to the body’s capacity to know. As Tracy McMullen explains, LeGuin’s carnal musicology “[exalts] the deep pleasure of practicing an instrument: of working with the body to deepen knowledge of one’s instrument, one’s body.”35 While this repeated notion of depth implies an irreducible intimacy with ones own bodily interiority, McMullen nonetheless tries to turn down the sensual and spiritual heat on LeGuin by replacing her carnality with the decidedly less-mystical notion of sentient corporeality to describe a way of thinking bodily action as a form of knowledge production. And yet, the notion of intercorporeality re-animates this mystical propensity, imbuing “face-to-face embodied interactions” with an alchemical power to instantiate community in and through the sharing of embodied knowledge.36 Pushing the body’s 33

Elizabeth LeGuin. Boccherini’s Body: An Essay in Carnal Musicology. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006, 7. 34 Jacques Derrida. Trans. Christine Irizarry. On Touching – Jean-Luc Nancy. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005, 188. 35 Tracy McMullen. “Corpo-Realities: Keepin' It Real in ‘Music and Embodiment’ Scholarship.” Current Musicology. New York: Fall 2006. p. 61-83. (my italics) 36 McMullen, 63.

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generative capacity still further, performance studies charges its bodies with the creation of “special worlds” that self-consciously break from every-day life through a utopian rejection of productive work and economic systematicity.37 While highly polarizing, this claim poses the body (and its complex cognates) as materials for liberation. Each in their own way, these differently inflected concepts frame the body as a highly knowledgeable agent of social participation, production and resistance. In this chapter, I trace music studies’ emplacement of these and other capacities within the body to a persistent crypto-dualism. While this persistence has undoubtedly served an important purpose (turning Descartes’ “bad dualism” in a musicologically “good dualism”), I want to know what new capacities and new antagonisms a genuine overcoming of dualism might yield. The discursive complexity of talking about bodily materiality is nearly matched by the challenge of talking about sonic materiality. How, I ask, has the very materiality of sound has been conceived such that it can be understood (and indeed experienced) as a force of socialization and as an impetus towards the social? And so, after outlining what I call music studies moral approach to the mind-body problem, I turn to a set of case studies in the history of the philosophical construction of sound that disrupt some of music studies’ moral arguments, preparing their ethical reconstitution through Spinoza. 37

Richard Schechner. Performance Theory. New York: Routledge, 1988, 13. 26

1.1 Substantial and Desubstantial Bodies In her 2004 polemic, “Music: Drastic of Gnostic?” Carolyn Abbate leverages a devastating critique of music studies’ treatment of the body and what she calls, after Vladimir Jankélévitch, the drastic in music. For all its commitment to the embodied action of music-making, Abbate argues, music studies has not found adequate critical means to attend to the physical power and seemingly magical strangeness of musical performance. Honing a definition of the drastic, she writes, Jankélévitch’s distinction between drastic and Gnostic involved more than a conventional opposition between music in practice and music in theory because the drastic connotes physicality, but also desperation and peril, involving a category of knowledge that flows from drastic actions and experience, and not from verbally mediated reasoning.38 Here, Abbate doesn’t argue for the primacy of the body as such, but instead argues for a new form of knowledge production capable of doing justice to its actions and experiences. It is time, she claims, for music studies to set aside hermeneutic and critical approaches that seek “supra-audible import” in musical sound, taking as given the notion the musical works are documents of their social, cultural and political

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Carolyn Abbate. “Music: Drastic or Gnostic?” Critical Inquiry. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Vol. 30, No. 3 (Spring, 2004): 505-536, p. 510. 27

context.39 In place of these methods, Abbate wants a new theory of musical performance that better comprehends the body’s power and presence while acknowledging that musical knowledge brokered through that power may not be discursive, argumentative, historical, or speakable at all. Abbate’s polemic responds to a tension between music studies’ interest in the textual construction of the body and its avowed commitment to the body as material form by enforcing a terse and schematic separation between hermeneutics (a mindcentric, Gnostic approach) and the wild and enchanting force of performing bodies. Trading the score, the archive and the recording for the fleshly, material and lived body, on Abbate’s read, might give us purchase on the condition of possibility for the production of musical meaning in the first place. Like Abbate, and much of music studies of the recent past, I am interested in material bodies, but my interest differs in

39

Ibid., 506.

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philosophical focus and scope.40 Redrawing, or reinforcing (as Abbate does) the mindbody distinction entails a differential allocation of power to thought over materiality, or vice versa. Interrogating dualisms, including the one Abbate herself proposes, entails examining how the category of materiality is delimited and thereby invested with some capacities and not others: this is my Spinozist wager. Rather than argue that the body has special power over and against the mind, I ask: what kinds of power do we tend to believe we’re attending to when we prioritize bodily materiality? While I 40

While I look at a wide swath of text in order to unpack what I see to be a cryptoCartesianism underlying music studies’ orientation toward the body, there are many texts (and theoretical nuances) which I will not address directly. Psychoanalytic approaches to musical bodies explain music’s immersive effects through the Freudian “Oceanic feeling,” a pre-Oedipal lack of separation between self and other. Naomi Cumming. “The Horrors of Identification: Reich’s ‘Different Trains.’” Perspective of New Music. Vol. 35, No. 1, (Winter 1997), pp.129-152; Robert Fink. Repeating Ourselves: American Minimal Music as Cultural Practice. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.; David Schwarz. Listening Subjects: Music Psychoanalysis, Culture. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997. Another set of texts enfolds the body into “Postmodern” rejections of master narratives. Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist. Rethinking Music. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.; Andrew Dell’Antonio. Beyond Structural Listening? Postmodern Modes of Hearing. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.; Lawrence Kramer. Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.; Lawrence Kramer. Music Meaning: A Critical History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Others argue that the basis for music analytic terms and metaphors are based in bodily experience. Andrew Mead. “Bodily Hearing: Physiological Metaphors and Musical Understanding.” Journal of Music Theory. Vol. 43, No. 1 (Spring, 1999), pp. 1-19.; Robert Walser. Running with the Devil: Power Gender and Madness in Heavy Metal. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1993. Some ethnographic approaches use the body as a research tool. Kyra Gaunt. The Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double Dutch to Hip-Hop. New York: New York University Press, 2006.; Michelle Kisliuk. Seize the Dance!: BaAa Musical Life and the Ethnography of Performance. New York: Oxford University Pres, 1998. Other historiographical approaches study diverse historical instantiation of the mind-body relation. Bruce Holsinger. Music the Body and Desire in Medieval Culture: Hildegard of Bingen to Chaucer. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001.; Kate van Orden. Music and Arms in Early Modern France. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. 29

recognize that contesting dualism’s traditional values infuses the body with readymade political power, it forecloses on alternative approaches to dualistic thinking. If, as Abbate and others maintain, the body is constantly eclipsed by “mental” approaches to music, advocating for bodies will always come before theorizing them. This dissertation offers an initial effort in thinking otherwise. But what does it mean to theorize the body? In her forthcoming article “Road Kill,” anthropologist Elizabeth Povinelli analyzes changing perspectives on the body throughout the last thirty years of critical theory.41 Her approach provides an enriched political context for Abbate’s opposition of textual construction to bodily presence, while explicating the stakes of thinking the body through the category of substance. This explication is extremely illuminating in the context of this project because the crucial differences between Spinoza and Descartes’ conception of the mind-body union rest on divergent conceptions of substance and substantiality. Povinelli takes substance to mean a constituent of being that requires nothing outside itself in order to exist – she calls this self-enclosure the metaphysics of substance. “Substances are the kinds of beings that can close in on themselves (becoming self-identical)” she explains, “while quality and quantity can only predicate, modify and find a dwelling in substances.”42 Thinking of substance as self-enclosed and self-identical proposes identities for persons that they simply cannot escape or transform. Grounding a 41

Elizabeth Povinelli. “Road Kill.” Unpublished manuscript. Povinelli distributed this manuscript as part of the Ethics of the Sensible Working Group at New York University in Spring 2008. 42 Povinelli, 9. 30

person’s attributes, qualities, social projects and goals in her “anatomic substrate” constitutes a dangerous model of governance that reduces a person to a body and reduces that body to a collection of irreducible material features. 43 Rather than contest the reduction of identity to bodily materiality, Povinelli explains, critical theory attacked the self-evidence of any material substance in the first place. “The reason we had to do this,” Povinelli writes, “was fairly clear: to resist disciplinary power, we had to decenter the self-identical substance which power created and in which power dwelled.”44 The body, in other words had to desubstantialized . This attack took shape according to two formations: the performative, on the one hand, and the virtual, on the other. Taken together, these critical approaches reject the emplacement of attributes of persons within a selfidentical substance (the body), theorizing bodily materiality itself as a product of power relations and, thus, a site for performative and pragmatic intervention. In Bodies that Matter (1993) Judith Butler explains that the capacity to produce intelligible materialities is “defined by a certain power of creation and rationality”45 which is unevenly distributed across the social field. By neither presuming materiality, nor rejecting it completely, Butler wants to understand how materiality is produced as power “in its formative or constituting effects.”46 Virtual approaches, drawn from the 43

Povinelli, 9-10. Povinelli, 10. 45 Judith Butler. Bodies That Matter. Excerpted in Beyond the Body Proper: Reading the Anthropology of Material Life. Ed. Margaret Lock and Judith Farquar. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007, 172. 46 Ibid., 170. 44

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prescriptive philosophy of Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) construe the body’s very existence as a form of transformation.47 In his Parables for the Virtual (2002), Brian Massumi (one of Povinelli’s exemplars of the virtual) develops the formula “body – (movement/sensation) – change” to describe how the body actualizes previously unthought potential in and through its movements within the social world.48 Taken together, Povinelli summarizes, these approaches powerfully undermined the reduction of person to substance by rejecting the self-evidence of substance itself. And yet, she argues that performativity and virtuality ultimately went too far in this effort. In the interest of empowering subjects over and against their substantiality, Povinelli explains, these approaches fail to comprehend the complex ways in which

47

While I draw, later in the project, on Deleuze’s more philosophical work on Spinoza, here I am referring to his work with Felix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus (1968) and Anti-Oedipus (1977), with perhaps special focus on the prescriptive “How to Make Yourself a Body Without Organs” (from A Thousand Plateaus) in which Deleuze and Guattari offer nothing short of a how-to manual for de-systematizing the body through sober, careful and strategic modifications. 48 Brian Massumi. Parables of the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002, 1.

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we are constituted in and through our bodily vulnerability.49 In his foundational Performance Theory (1988), Richard Schechner exemplifies this failure particularly well when he declares performance’s independence from “productive work” and the unequal distribution of resources it instantiates.50 Povinelli develops a critique of unchecked desubstantialization through her unique philosophically-inflected approach to ethnography, parlaying her experience with exemplary bodily risk and expenditure in indigenous Australia into a reconstitution of substantiality as a form of vulnerable becoming. Povinelli narrates a harrowing (though, ultimately successful) experience navigating a low-fuel, low-power motorboat through the rough waters of the North Australian Anson Bay with four indigenous Australian friends. Ostensibly, she tells us, they’re on their way to remote beach to emplace barcodes in the landscape as part of a cultural tourism project that “embeds traditional, historical, and contemporary knowledge back into the landscape from which it came.”51 But completing this objective, Povinelli ruminates, is not exactly an adequate explanation for the determination and vulnerability that emerged during the boat’s fraught voyage. What conception of substance, she asks, can take into account both the complex merging of

49

Judith Butler is a paradigmatic case here in the sense that, since, her work shows a nuanced attention to the co-related categories of vulnerability and materiality. In Undoing Gender, (2004) Butler theorizes the production of gender through the “social vulnerability of our bodies” and not, primarily, through performative activity. Interestingly, she cites Spinoza in order to sketch a view of that social vulnerability the recognizes the constitutive desire of every being to persist in its existence (31). In her Precarious Life (2004), Butler examines how the work of mourning values some lives as “mournable” while ignoring the deaths of many others. 50 Schechner, 1-25. 51 Povinelli, 6. 33

human bodies with the materiality of the boat, the sea and its forces as well as the distribution of power that motivates the mission and five people committed to it in the first place? Drawing on Foucault’s ethics of substance, developed in The History of Sexuality, Volume II, Povinelli reconceives bodies as “a result of constitutive exposures within matrices of ideological invested differential distributions.” 52 What does this mean? Vulnerability and security are unevenly distributed throughout the social and political field and that distribution posits the body as a site of risk and expenditure. Our exposures to one another in and through this distribution precipitate material modulations of the body’s capacities, creating a ground upon which what Povinelli calls a new ethics of life might emerge.53 Such projects rest, Povinelli explains, in “rehabituating being, not from the perspective transcendental ‘ideal,’ but from the perspective of a being that is in the world but does not of yet have a proper dwelling.”54 Povinelli proposes the substantial body as a site of an on-going, everpartial project of negotiating a place for itself within different matrices of social, political, economic and cultural belonging. Before bringing the relation between the metaphysics of substance, celebratory desubstantialization and the ethics of substance to bear on music studies interest in the body, I want to put a finer point on what exactly Povinelli’s commits to when she

52

Povinelli., 11-12. Ibid., 11-12. 54 Povinelli, 11. 53

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models her approach to substantiality on Foucault’s ethics of substance. She elegantly, but somewhat cryptically describes Foucault’s position vis-à-vis substance as “substance within substance against substance.”55 What can this mean? For Foucault, ethics delimits what Paul Rabinow calls a “free relation to the self” by which the subject stylizes her relationship to contemporary modes of intelligible belonging.56 As a crucial aspect of this self-relation, the “ethics of substance” describes how the subject designates this or that part of herself as the primary site for this ethical work. Ethical work, Foucault asserts in his late thought, forecloses on self-identical understandings of the subject. “You do not have the same type of relationship to yourself,” Foucault writes, “when you constitute yourself as a political subject…as when you are seeking to fulfill your desires in a sexual relationship…we are not dealing with the same kind of subject.”57 Our ethical projects produce multiple “subjects” through variegated tactical engagement with differently structured modes of social and political belonging. Ethical substance designates the divergent materials in and through which these negotiations are carried out. So, if we were going to think of the Foucauldian ethical subject as a “substance within substance against substance,” we might think of her as a subject whose ethical projects provoke her to differ from herself.

55

Povinelli, 11. Paul Rabinow. “Introduction.” In Michel Foucault: Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth. Ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: The New Press, 1994., xxvii. 57 Foucault, 290. 56

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Although music studies has drawn richly upon many of the positions Povinelli outlines (particularly Foucaldian theories of power and Butlerian theories of performativity), the music fields never mounted an attack against the metaphysics of substance with an intensity equal to the discourses Povinelli discusses. In fact, in the most basic sense, Abbate’s drastic/Gnostic polemic is a passionate argument for regrounding the field in the materiality of the substantial body. Before music studies could begin to examine, say, the particularities of how music might participate in the reduction of persons to an anatomical substrate, music’s effect on the body had to enter the fields’ purview in the first place. When, in the 1980s, Joseph Kerman pointed out that musicology was revered primarily for its production of positivistic knowledge about the Western high-art tradition over its insight into musical experience, locating a site at which to research and theorize that “experience” became paramount. The body became the medium through which music studies was to forge and maintain its connection to experience, bringing with it the complex challenges of understanding music’s relationship to gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity, complexly conjugated with new progressive political and ethical directives of the New Left, postcountercultural movements and post-Civil Rights projects. “Desubstantial” theories of the body’s social and performative construction and theories of “substantial” bodily expenditure and creativity in performance and listening garnered equal, if different, powers in the highly self-critical and powerfully politicized “New” Musicology that resulted.

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And yet, Abbate argues that musicology has still not done enough to attend to substantial performing bodies. How should we read Abbate’s injuction to return to the substantial performing body against Povinelli’s genealogy? Although Abbate lacks Povinelli’s biopolitical acumen, she argues that there is something unethical about the fields’ allegedly foreclosure on the physical power of performance. With the counterposition of substantiality and desubstantiality very much in mind, I put two questions to Abbate’s polemic. One: what kind of substantiality does Abbate’s drastic invoke? And two: why should the body’s substantiality be so hard to attend to in the first place? 1.2 The “New” Musicological Body In order to examine these questions, I turn to major texts in the “New” Musicology’s commitment to the body. I use Povinelli’s opposition of “substantiality” to “desubstantiality” to distinguish between scholars committed to performance and listening from others interested in social construction, but like any binary distinction, these terms’ inadequacy will become as interesting and illuminating as their explanatory power. Music studies’ celebratory anti-Cartesianism will stand in starkest relief through work on the substantial body, while in Povinelli’s genealogy, desubstantial thinkers celebrate the rejection of substance as such. Both positions take strong a priori stances on what bodily substantiality is and what it is able to do in social and political domains – and it is precisely this presumptive practice with which

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my Spinozistic approach ultimately takes issue. The substantial body garners disruptive force against the regulatory mind through recognition and reversal of Cartesian categories. Even though, on this logic, the body’s threat to epistemological integrity and mental control becomes a critique of given knowledge and constituted power, the notion that the mind-body relation is an antagonistic one remains intact. Susan McClary’s afterword to Jacques Attali’s Noise: The Political Economy of Music is a paradigmatic case of this politicization. There, she uses the mind-body dyad to parse not human subjects, but musical practices. Some are emancipatory, while others are not. Serial and post-serial composition become asocial, apolitical and disembodied. Insofar as they reside in academic enclaves, these practices self-consciously inure themselves again social and corporeal contamination. This power is contested by musicians and composers like Laurie Anderson, Joan La Barbara, David Hykes and Philip Glass “who manage not to be silenced by the institutional framework, who are dedicated to injecting back into music the noise of the body, of the visual, of emotions and of gender.”58 So, if these are “bodily” and thus anti-institutional composers, their work should be able to give us a sense for what a progressive musical ethics sounds like. Joan La Barbara calls to mind earnest and experimental vocal intimacy, while Laurie Anderson uses vocal processing to uncouple voice from identity through self-conscious synthesis 58

Susan McClary. “Afterword.” In Jacques Attali. Noise: The Political Economy of Music. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 157.

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of popular idioms and experimental technology. Phillip Glass uses a familiar, consonant harmonic vocabulary to build swaths of repetitive, seamless rhythmic energy. Upending Adorno’s musico-political values, McClary judges the social and political relevance of musical practices on their willingness to embrace vocal intimacy, symmetrical, intuitive rhythmic structures and a readily intelligible harmonic vocabulary that (sometimes) references (and thus legitimizes) popular genres. While these conventions come to signify music’s bodiliness (and hence its connection to sociality, culture and gender) they also signify a self-conscious opposition to analytic proclivities and institutional power. As such, the body takes on a disruptive quality that threatens, just as it does in Descartes’ epistemology, the consistency and integrity of the institutional mind. In an equally influential article, “Feminist Theory, Music Theory and the Mind/Body Problem” (1994), Suzanne Cusick cultivates a more nuanced understanding of how dualism’s exclusionary logics work in the context of musical knowledge. For Cusick, like McClary, the mind-body problem encompasses much more that the human being as such. In Cusick’s hands, “mind” and “body” delineate two different ways to produce musical knowledge. We can come to know music through the analytic mind or the material actions of the body. These categories then become codified within disciplinary methodology as “analysis” and “performance,” separated by the thorny interval I’ve been calling mind-body interaction. Like Abbate, Cusick emplaces performance at the core of her understanding of musicality, but she parlays that commitment into a specific engagement with gender performativity ! a 39

desubstantial move. Cusick thus speculates, “if bodily performance can be bothconstitutive of gender and metaphors for gender, then, we who study the results of bodily performances like music might profitably look to our subject as a set of scripts for bodily performances which might actually constitute gender for the performers and which may be recognizable as metaphors for gender for those who witness the performers’ displays.”59 Cusick looks to strike a balance between thinking about “actual bodies” and the texts which script their performative action. While recognizing the challenge of maintaining fidelity to this body, she recasts the Cartesian mind-body opposition as an opposition between composer/analyst and performer. She writes, “the composer is masculine not because so many individuals in that category are biologically male, but because the composer has come to be understood to be the mind – mind that creates patterns of sounds to which other minds assign meaning.”60 The composing mind asserts sovereign control over musical sound just as the Cartesian mind asserts sovereign control over the body. Formal analysis, then, documents the workings of that mind by attending to the details of how the composing mind wields this power. And so, a tightly concentric collection of terms begins to aggregate around the concept of mind: composer, analyst, masculine, control, creation. This collection, then, comes to threaten not only other approaches (such as the one Cusick pursues through analysis

Suzanne Cusick. “Feminist Theory, Music Theory and the Mind/Body Problem.” Perspective of New Music. Vol. 32, No. 1, (Winter 1994): 8-27, 14. 60 Cusick, 16. 59

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based on gender performativity), but also other musical subjectivities. “It is performers,” Cusick writes, “who are most ignored and dismissed by a mind-mind conception of music.”61 The analytic models that Cusick indicts, here, refuse to account for the bodily action that forms, in many ways, its condition of possibility. But as it turns out, Cusick’s performers can achieve musical knowledge that is inaccessible by other analytic means. This claim emerges from a powerful account of what happens when performers are written out of the mind-centric analytic circuit. She writes, To deny musical meaning to things only the performers of a work will know implicitly denies that performers are knowers, knowers whose knowledge comes from their bodies and their minds. To deny musical meaning to purely physical, performative things is in effect to transform human performers into machines for the transmission of mind-mind

messages

between

members

of

a

metaphorically

disembodied class, and because, disembodied elite.62 Without mentioning Descartes by name, Cusick indicts the Cartesian conception of the body as automated, inanimate and machinic. Such a conception, she implies, makes performing bodies susceptible to exploitation and instrumentalization by agential minds. In order to short-circuit this machinic construction, Cusick ultimately explains,

61 62

Cusick, 18. Cusick, 19-20. 41

the body must be understood to have some kind of agency with respect to the production of knowledge. And so, rather than ascribe a disruptive capacity to the body, as McClary does, Cusick endows the body with the capacity to know. This knowledge, as it turns out, is irreducible to formal analysis or hermeneutic interpretations. She explains, “an embodied music theory, then, would include in its notion of musical meaning things which could not be heard by even the most attentive co-composing listener.”63 Cusick cordons off a category of musical meaning that is only accessible to performing bodies, endowing the performer with epistemological secrets that silently undermine the adequacy of mind-centric analytic approaches. This theme will appear again, as I’ll show, in performer-centered scholarship. For now, however, let it suffice to note that Cusick’s formulation of an embodied music theory enforces a strict separation of mind from body. While empowering the body with a specialized form of knowledge production, Cusick’s interest in opposing that specialization to dominant modes of analysis forces her to reinscribe dualism’s structure despite reversing its values. Taken together, Cusick and McClary’s foundational arguments set forth two important precepts for musicological dealings with the body. One: the body has what might best be called the political power to interrupt or short-circuit constituted power. Two: the body has the power to produce knowledge about musical works and practices that is inaccessible by other means, which might be called a form of epistemological

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Cusick, 20. 42

power. The body’s access to secret knowledge can then be resignified as a form of political power by opposing itself to analytic or otherwise institutional knowledge that falls under the Cartesian rubric of “mind” in Cusick and McClary’s texts. And yet, this nascent power is only intelligible from within a Cartesian framework. Does this hold true for more recent essays in bodily substantiality? Delimiting how the fleshly body participates in the production of knowledge is crucial for the substantialist approach, which typically emerges in relation to performance. Dealing with the substantial body in this way creates a two-pronged challenge. On the one hand, we must establish and accept the notion that the body has some kind of special relation to knowledge production, developing strategies for explaining how the body’s actions constitute knowledge of some kind. On the other hand, then, we must consider why, how and to what degree that knowledge is transmissible in order to become constitutive of new forms of power and sociability. In their performer-centered scholarship, Elizabeth LeGuin and Tomie Hahn both deal with these challenges in different ways. LeGuin’s coinage of a “carnal musicology” ratchets the intensity of what performing bodies can do; through the deep intimacy of practice and reflection, LeGuin explains, she activates a relation with the long-departed composer that is so reciprocal the she feels herself inhabited or informed by Boccherini’s own corporeality. Here, the performing body becomes a transductive agent that renders forth what LeGuin would like us to believe is the indubitable presence of the composer. Hahn, on the other hand, narrates how racial

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identity and personal history inflect her execution of the Japanese dance tradition nihon buyo. While taking her own body as a research object, Hahn struggles to keep it in her ethnographic purview – the body doesn’t always lend itself easily to thirdperson observation, and thus is not easily reported. Hahn thus problematizes the transmission of embodied knowledge, explaining “…conveying a lived experience is challenging, particularly if it is a performance practice that you ‘know’ in your body but do not regularly transmit to someone else.”64 While LeGuin looks to Rousseau for historical support for her attempt to render forth a composer’s presence through performance, Hahn seems unable to theorize how to project and thus transmit her embodied knowledge through the medium of scholarship. In their own way, both LeGuin and Hahn imply that some form of sacrifice underpins the production of embodied knowledge. Hahn emphasizes that cultivating the self-reflexivity her research requires was particularly painful, while LeGuin speaks of the challenge of scrutinizing the body’s movement as well as the sorrow immanent to suturing her own body that of a long-departed composer. While these bodies are constituted through their contact with historical and cultural specificity, they are nonetheless, in Povinelli’s words, exposed and thus made vulnerable through that constitutive contact. Why does the production of embodied knowledge, appear in both texts, as an epistemological burden? For Descartes, the body must be properly 64

Tomie Hahn. Sensational Knowledge: Embodying Culture Through Japanese Dance. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2007, 20.

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controlled in order for the thinker to produce reliable knowledge. At best, for Descartes, the body becomes remains irrelevant to the production of knowledge and at worst, it suffers for it. Even thought LeGuin and Hahn both attempt to finesse the relation between embodied action and knowledge, they do not break with the fundamentally Cartesian notion that the production of knowledge as such requires some form of bodily sacrifice. While recognizing and respecting their singularity, is there a way to talk about substantial bodies that replaces this logic of sacrifice with a more robust position on the transmissibility of what and how they know? While the substantial body, in these cases, becomes a crucible for irreducible knowledge, in others, it becomes crucible for resistance. McClary’s work is a lighting rod in this respect. Battling tirelessly against “the dismissal of the body that recurs consistently throughout Western culture,”65 McClary asserts that what makes music so compelling is “its uncanny ability to make us experience our own bodies in accordance with its gestures and rhythms.”66 While prioritizing the textual means by which music constructs sexuality and gender, McClary simultaneously argues that music conveys those constructions in a particularly intimate, immediate and corporeal way. Thus, the listening body becomes a special, politicized site at which we reject or accept social, cultural and political normativities in their sonorous form. 65

Susan McClary & Robert Walser. “Theorizing the Body in African-American Music. Black Music Research Journal, Vol. 14, No. 1 (Spring 1994): 75-84, p. 76. 66 Susan McClary. Feminine Endings: Music, Gender and Sexuality. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991, 23.

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Roland Barthes and Adriana Cavarero emplace similarly resistive and transformative potential within the material body. Though Barthes’ famous “grain” of the voice is often treated as a cipher for individuality or expressivity, it bears an unmistakable critical valence. First and foremost, the grain of the voice is concomitant with the sonorous presence of the body. “The grain,” Barthes reminds us, “is the body in the voice as its sings.”67 The fleshly substantiality of this body is what makes the grain, for Barthes, such a powerful site for the production of pleasure as the corollary to resistance to the social order. The grain emerges when the body refuses to become a transparent medium for the transmission of signifying systems that serve “communication, representation, expression, everything that is customary to talk about which forms the tissue of cultural values, which takes its bearing directly upon the ideological alibis of a period.”68 The body’s refusal to become fully complicit with these features of social life announces itself in sound: through mistakes, awkward turns of phrase, strange inflections and fleshly paralanguage. The substantial body, for Barthes, becomes a medium in and through which we can critique our ideological environment – and attend to critiques wagered by others. While Barthes sees this resistive capacity as a locus of pleasure, Adriana Cavarero frames the embodied voice as a political agent. Like Barthes, Cavarero associates the

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Roland Barthes. “The Grain of the Voice.” In Image, Music Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977, 188. 68 Ibid., 182. 46

voice with the subject’s corporeal uniqueness.69 This voice refers us to the substantial body that houses it – it “implicates a correspondence with the fleshly cavity that alludes to the deep body and the most bodily parts of the body.”70 Cavarero’s voices hold fast to their own uniqueness, resisting what she calls “the inaugural moment of metaphysics which consists in a double gesture whereby speech is separated from speakers and finds its home in thought.”71 Attending to the vocal and corporeal uniqueness of speakers, Cavarero implies, highlights philosophy’s failure to distinguish the immaterial action of thinking from the material instantiation of uniqueness through the sounding voice. This envoicing of difference ultimately becomes an avatar for nothing less than political transformation in the context of global democracy. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s valuation of relational processes of saying (over that content that is said) in the context of the political, Cavarero conceives politics as the generation of community through envoiced interaction. By speaking to another, I put myself under injunction to attend to, respect or accommodate my interlocutor’s irreducible uniqueness. If she does the same for me, then together we begin to construct a highly local politics founded on a respect for the subjective uniqueness rendered forth by the voice. For Cavarero, the body founds a politics of envoiced locality over and against a homogenized global, while the body, for Barthes and McClary, functions as an agent

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Adriana Cavarero. For More Than One Voice: A Philosophy of Vocal Expression. Trans. Paul A. Kottman. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005. 70 Cavarero, 4. 71 Cavarero, 9. 47

of political resistance within and against extant systems. While Cavarero may implicitly ratify the claims to bodily uniqueness that undergird LeGuin and Hahn’s accounts, can more be said about the interaction of bodies other than they are, simply, unique? These approaches install an impetus toward critical or political transformation and a unique capacity for knowledge production within the body’s very materiality. Desubstantial treatments of the body yield different construals of these capacities. In his review of Richard Leppert’s magnificent The Sight of Sound, Lawrence Kramer summarizes this aspect of the field’s attention to the body particularly well. Arguing against the reversal of dualism’s values that I’ve been examining thus far, Kramer explains, Short of simple reverse affirmations – three cheers for shake, rattle and roll – any attempt to reconnect the music with the body requires that the body itself be conceived as a historical production, as a social rather than natural fact…the body’s hardware, of course, is pretty well fixed, but the software changes constantly. Given this understanding, it becomes possible to study both the way music as sounding presence shapes incites and controls the social body, and how the sight of the music-making body and its instruments, which are no less a part of the

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music than the fabric of the notes, prescribe normative bodies and situate them in space.72 The pervasive language of control and discipline is notable here – and Kramer says as much, claiming that Leppert’s book is overly concerned with music’s regulative function vis-á-vis the body.73 In a particularly compelling engagement with the mindbody relation as such, Leppert treats 18th- and 19th-century listening etiquette as a hyper-amplification of the mind’s assumed control over body. Leppert writes, “…the problematics of contemplation, a ‘mental’ activity, emerge the moment mind intersect with body. The etiquette of ‘contemplation’ is, before anything else, a controlling of the body in time, a working against the body, whether self-imposed or imposed by others.”74 Far from opening the body to new critical positions by engaging its materiality (however construed), Leppert’s disciplined listening negates the body, ratcheting up the Cartesian mind’s power over its inert, agency-less materiality. Unlike many in his cohort, Leppert shows music to be complicit with dualism’s social performance. McClary manages to become a centrifugal node in both desubstantialist and substantialist treatments of the body. 75 Though she opposes Leppert’s position on

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Lawrence Kramer. “Review: The Sight of Sound: Music, Representation and the History of the Body by Richard Leppert.” Music Library Association. Vol. 52, No. 1 (Sept 1995); 57-59, p.58. 73 Richard Leppert. The Sight of Sound: Music, Representation and the History of the Body. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. 74 Leppert 25. 75 In her famous Feminine Endings, McClary buttresses her hermeneutic analyses of musical construction of bodies with a related interest in how music creates the 49

music’s regulative function, she advocates for a hermeneutic approach to musical sound that unpacks how gesture, harmonic syntax and form encode constructions of gender, sexuality, race, class and ethnicity. This hermeneutic approach examines how difference is conveyed in musical sound, which as I’ve argued in relation to the Afterword to Noise, facilitates politicized pronouncements about what constitutes normative versus radical musical practice. This particular style of hermeneutic analysis prioritizes the representation and recognition of women, sexual, racial and ethnic minorities in musical texts, reflecting a broader interest in identity and a politics of recognition within the humanities and social sciences more broadly. Because these political imperatives are enacted directly, on McClary’s read, upon the listening body through sound, our capacity to decode the representative aspects of music sound becomes all the more urgent. In her introduction to Musicology and Difference (1993), another signal text, Ruth Solie approaches music studies’ interest in embodied social difference as a specifically juridical matter – an affiliation “New” Musicological scholarship rarely attempted to forge. After charging Descartes’ cogito with the production of an illusory universal theory of subjectivity, Solie doesn’t take an anti-Cartesian stance on the production of difference, lambasting Descartes for grounding the social in the cogito’s universality. Instead, she parlays precisely that implicitly celebratory critique into the juridical

embodied and affective effects. Susan McClary. Feminine Endings: Music, Gender & Sexuality. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1991.

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realm, offering a caveat that claims to/of difference along identitarian axes sometimes entail an uneven and often discriminatory allocation of attributes and resources. Thus, Solie cites legal scholar Martha Minow’s claim that, “when we identify one thing as like the others, we are not merely classifying the world; we are investing particular classifications with consequences and positioning ourselves in relation to those meanings.”76 By framing the text with Minow’s caveat, Solie cautions against an uncritical celebration of difference by sensitizing music studies to juridical procedures for balancing the legal recognition of difference with the always-imminent possibility of discrimination. Cartesian universality, for Solie, yields not moral critique, but a new juridical milieu for thinking about difference in anti-Cartesian perspective.77

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Solie 2. In “On Diversity,” co-authored with Jairo Moreno, I study the juridical standard for identity-based legal actions insofar as they impacted precedent-setting decisions on race-conscious admission procedures University of California Regents vs. Allen Bakke (1977) and later cases Grutter & Gratz vs. Lee Bollinger (2003) The “scrutiny” that I mention above refers the two-pronged legal “test” to which all legislation or policy that groups individuals according to race or ethnicity are put. The first test, “compelling state interest” weighs the policy’s benefits for the state against its potential incursion on the individual’s constitution rights. The second test, “narrow tailoring,” (only applied after compelling state interest has been established) demands that the policy’s goal be achieved through the “least intrusive means possible.” Strict scrutiny demands careful engagement with the precedent, rationale and possible implications for racial and ethnic classifications in the law. This practice has a complex history in the context of Brown v. Board of Education and later cases pertinent to the interment of Japanese Americans during WW II (Toyosaburo Korematsu v. United States (1944) and Hirabayashi v. United States (1943)), which both use strict scrutiny rule the internment constitutional. Amy Cimini and Jairo Moreno. “On Diversity.” Gamut: Online Journal of the Music Theory Society of the Mid-Atlantic. Vol. 2, Issue 1. July 2009, 1-86, 32. http://trace.tennessee.edu/gamut/vol2/iss1/6/. Accessed 20 July 2011. 77

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One of the few music scholars to approach Descartes’ dualism from the perspective of mind-body interaction is, interestingly, Christopher Small. Small arrives at dualism by way of Gregory Bateson’s ecological approach to epistemology, which locates thought at the conjunction of environmental constrains and agential impulses. How in this seemingly divided Cartesian universe, matter and mind can act upon each other is a seemingly insoluble problem that Descartes bequeathed to succeeding generations. In particular, it makes a human being a divided creature, consisting of a corporeal body that is extended in space and subject to the laws of physics and chemistry and an incorporeal mind that is lodged within it, yet is not part of it, and appears not to be subject to any scientifically discoverable laws.78 Although Small recognizes this as an intellectual historical problem, he is primarily interesting in neuroscientific solutions which understand the mind, not as a selfenclosed substance but as a process imbricated in the nervous system and the living materiality of the body more generally. While Descartes entertains a similar fantasy with respect to how the human subject experiences herself as a mind united with a body, Spinoza is able to develop a theory of mind-body relatedness that actually accounts for this intimate a tie between the mind and body.

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Christopher Small. Musicking: The Meanings of Performance and Listening. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1998, 51.

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Neuroscientific approaches, like those Small’s approvingly includes in Musicking, work at the truth of the mind-body interaction in the context of the substantial body. Although he doesn’t append his claims directly to the Cartesian mind-body union, Vijay Iyer offers a similar correlation of time, bodily action and thought in his “Exploding the Narrative in Jazz Improvisation.”79 Emplacing music’s affective power in its capacity to resemble and thus elicit fundamental bodily actions, Iyer links bodily to musical activities based on what he calls the time-scales in which they unfold. For the sake of clarity, I have reproduced his table below.

Fig. 1 ! Vijay Iyer’s Analysis of Time and Bodily Motion. Here, Iyer’s highly taxonomic view of the relation of bodily materiality to temporality proposes a scheme for understanding musical and bodily gesture, citing “recent 79

Vijay Iyer. “Exploding the Narrative in Jazz Improvisation.” In Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies. Ed. Robert O’Meally, Brent Hayes Edwards and Farah Jasmine Griffin. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004, 396.

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neurological studies that have affirmed the cognitive role of body motion in music perception and production.”80 Both Iyer and Small make (or imply) a much simpler claim about Cartesian dualism than the discursively complex engagements with substantiality and desubstantiality I have discussed. Thanks to recent advances in neuroscience and cognitive studies, they imply, we now know that Descartes was flatout wrong about the mind’s independence from the body.81 While neuroscientific research might purport to explain what “really happens” between the mind and the body when we experience music, it approach offers little in the way of historical context for dualism’s social and political manifestations. Lacking purchase on that intellectual history, these thinkers cannot grasps music’s imbrication in the formation of dualism in the first place, which in the primary concern of the next chapter. While the substantial body is still very much in musicology’s sights, few scholars still muster the critical energy of Cusick or McClary when it comes to anti-Cartesian legitimation of the body. In her Listening to the Sirens, Judith Peraino adapts Foucault’s ‘technologies of the self’ to musical experience, thinking substantiality as the production of difference in the context of what Foucault calls an ontologically free

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Ibid., 396. Descartes’ did theorize that mind directs the body (and that the body conducts information to the mind) through the movements of the tiny pineal gland. As the seat of the Cartesian soul, the pineal gland stands in for the processing of what we now know to be a complex neurological network, but many thinkers – notably Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia and Baruch Spinoza – remain unconvinced that the pineal gland can sufficiently account for how the capacities of the body and mind are supposed to be compared in the first places. 81

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relation to the self.82 Other work sidelines the “New” Musicology’s anti-Cartesian firepower in order to consider its injunctions to substantiality in historical perspective. This work, largely performer- and composer-centric, places the bodily practices of individuals at the epicenter of social, political, aesthetic or theoretical networks; I am thinking here of Julie Brown’s study of Bartók’s bodily practices, Cusick’s prioritization of Francesca Caccini’s transmission of affective bodily agency through pedagogy, Paul Sanden’s study of Glen Gould’s self-identification with the mind-body problem and Emily Wilbourne’s treatment of the commedia dell’arte as a document of the sonorous body.83 While these approaches do not self-consciously avow a New Musicological crypto-dualism, they are in many ways its heirs.

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As Foucault explains, the very notion that power is relational assumes an ontological freedom in virtue of which subjects maintain a degree of mobility with respect to constituted power. We cultivate our ethical projects of self-care in dialogue with this ontological freedom (Foucault 1994, 284). For Peraino, Foucault’s ethics of substance encourages us cultivate and stylize our relation to constituted power and Peraino seeks a specifically music form of stylization along Foucauldian coordinates. She writes, “it is Foucault’s integration of ethics and aesthetics that holds promise for an account of music as self-practice that cuts across symbolic systems and instigates ethical questions of individual conduct vis-à-vis discipline and desire within or against inplace social and symbolic structures.” Judith Peraino. Listening to the Sirens: Technologies of Queer Identity from Homer to Hedwig. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006, 12. 83 Julie Brown. Bartók and the Grotesque: Studies in Modernity, the Body and Contradition in Music. London: Ashgate, 2007; Suzanne Cusick. Francesca Caccino at the Medici Court: Music and the Circulation of Power. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009; Paul Sanden. “Hearing Glenn Gould's Body: Corporeal Liveness in Recorded Music.” Current Musicology. (Fall 2009) p. 7-36.; Emily Wilbourne. “Lo Schiavetto (1612): Travestied Sound, Ethnic Performance and the Eloquence of the Body.” Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 63, No. 1 (Spring 2010): 1-43.

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Following this performer-centered historiography (or in her case, ethnography) Tracy McMullen braces an important (though soft-spoken) critique of uncritical celebration of the body against her analysis of trombonist Abbie Conant’s self-styled embodied relationship to professional orchestral politics.84 While McMullen’s work fits comfortably with the texts I mention above, she questions the adequacy of positing bodies as progressive and disruptive simply in virtue of their being bodies. Imbricated as she is in the language of critical improvisation studies, this intervention unfolds through the category of intercorporeality. “Some scholars,” she writes, “seem to take music’s distinctive relation to the body as the only tool necessarily to produce this valued intercorporeality, as if intercorporeality in itself were the goal.”85 When the body becomes and end of research and theorizing, instead of a means, McMullen argues, it becomes impossible to see that the experience of “listening and performing…is often a profoundly intercorporeal experience, but not necessarily a progressive one.” 86 I set this critique against Abbate’s forceful moral injunction to re-emplace musical production and circulation within the body. Abbate’s ‘drastic or Gnostic’ side-steps evidence that pro-body polemics may be on the wane, issuing instead, nothing short of a disciplinary mandate to fidelity to embodied performance and listening. What, following McMullen, prevents Abbate’s ethics of the drastic from simply re-

84

Tracy McMullen. “Corpo-Realities: Keepin' It Real in ‘Music and Embodiment’ Scholarship.” Current Musicology. (Fall 2006). p. 61-83. 85 Ibid., 63 86 Ibid., 63. 56

emplacing a compulsory progressive ethics or an a priori oppositionality to the drastic itself? The success of anti-Cartesian polemics rests with their ascription of highly specialized capacities to the body, whether these are related to knowledge production, political critique or the activation of some relation between the two. Bodies aggregate these capacities with special intensity, in part, because musical sound is assumed to act upon their substantiality with particular power and immediacy. An examination of the sonic materiality that allegedly acts with such power now seems to be in order.

1.3 Vibration, Difference and the Force of Sonic Relationality

A close look at disparate theories of sonic materiality yields a highly uneven and often contradictory view onto the how sound’s action upon the body disposes us toward others and ourselves. Though I do not offer anything close to a comprehensive genealogy of sonic materiality here, the case studies I examine demonstrate how constructions of sonic materiality through the figure of vibration propose radically different modes of self- and social- relatedness. While these case studies support McMullen’s injunction toward a more flexible understanding of embodiment’s relation to community, I ground them in a destabilization of familiar distinctions between they eye and the ear (active/passive, intellectual/sensual, directional/immersive), preparing to rethink the ascription of progressive sociality to bodies in sound.

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In her recent Sounding New Media, Frances Dyson helpfully outlines some of the compelling ramifications of thinking sound in a specifically vibrational way, The shift [toward thinking of sound as vibration] introduces a different, perhaps paradoxical notion of materiality: the materiality of a process, of a multiple, mutating form found in a figure closely tied to sound – the figure of vibration. Vibration literally and figuratively fluctuates between particle and wave, object and event, being and becoming. Defying representation, it also gestures towards the immersive, undifferentiated, multiplicitous associations that aurality provokes, without committing to the (massive) representational and ontological ambiguities that aurality raises.87 Vibration, Dyson implies, is both self-contained and self-differential – it is like a material thing, but it is also constituted through process. Without making strong claims on behalf of vibration’s relation to immersion, Dyson hints at its commonplace discursive construction as a material force that effaces assumed stable boundaries: self/other, nature/culture, organic/inorganic, etc. To the extent that sound seems to liquidate boundaries in this way, it is becomes associated with the introduction of difference, alterity and relationality.

87

Frances Dyson. Sounding New Media: Immersion and Embodiment in the Arts and Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009, 11.

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Dyson thinks of vibration as both “pseudoscientific” and “undecidable.” While vibration’s wave-like materiality seems amenable to empirical study, its ephemerality and propensity to disrespect boundaries undermine its object-like status. Spectralism, deep drone musics and granular synthesis attempt this pseudoscience by claiming to derive their compositional methods from sound’s material nature.88 And yet, the boundary-neutralizing undecidability that Dyson attributes to vibration throws a much broader historical distinction between hearing and vision into relief. As Martin Jay 88

In his highly polemical corpus, Tristan Murail justifies the visual and aural complexity of spectral music by proposing timbre as the “natural” truth beneath excrescent historical parameters like pitch, register, duration and harmony. As opposed to the “New” complexity style exemplified by Brian Ferneyhough and others, a complex aesthetics grounded in the continuous frequency of sonic spectra is thus justified by precisely its naturalness, not by what Murail sees to be historical and political conceits. The problematic disavowal of history is clear here, and I have discussed it extensively with friend and colleague Brian Kane. Relatedly, Murail posits electro-acoustic composition as spectralism’s predecessor with respect to grounding of composition on robust and thoroughly researched claims about the “interior life of sound.” (Tristan Murail. “Spectra and Sprites.” Trans. Tod Machover. In Contemporary Music Review. Vol. 24. No 2/3 (April/June 2005): 137-146; Tristan Murail. “The Revolution of Complex Sound.” Trans. Joshua Cody. In Contemporary Music Review. Vol. 24. No 2/3, (April/June 2005): 121-135). In my “Gilles Deleuze and the Musical Spinoza,” I examine Xenakis’ explication of the compositional practice of granular synthesis which relies upon an atomistic, particle-like theory of what sound is made of – “sonic grains, elementary sonic particles, sonic quanta.” (Iannis Xenakis. Formalized Music: Thought and Mathematics in Composition. Indiana University Press, 1971, 43). This atomistic view yokes Xenakis and his loquacious advocate Curtis Roads to a history of sonic materiality that de-emphasized the prominence of the vibrational “wave-model” of sound that rose to prominence in the 17th century. (Curtis Roads, with John Strawn, Curtis Abbott, John Gordon and Philip Greenspun. The Computer Music Tutorial. Boston: MIT Press, 1996; Mitchell Whitelaw. “Sound Particles and Microsonic Materialism,” Contemporary Music Review, 22/4. (November 2003): 93-100.; Amy Cimini. “Gilles Deleuze and the Musical Spinoza.” In Sounding the Virtual: Gilles Deleuze and the Theory and Philosophy of Music. Ed. Brian Hulse and Nick Nesbitt. Surrey: Ashgate, 2010.

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points out, sound’s affiliation with these features often unfolds in self-conscious opposition to the historical primacy of vision as a proxy for certain knowledge and ethical clarity.89 As Jay helpfully underscores, Descartes’ conception of thought rests on the metaphor of the “unblinking eye of the fixed gaze,” which guides a philosophical journey that constitutes the thinker as a spectator rather than an actor.90 While Descartes’ image-like conception of thought will become an important point of contention for Spinoza, for now let it suffice to say that this association of thought with vision grounds a number of common wisdom strategies for parsing the differences between the ear and eye. The eye is active, directional, agential, perspectival and oriented towards truth and knowledge, while the ear is passive, immersive, non-direction, penumbral, oriented toward affect and materiality. While this distinction holds true in many cases, sound can (and does) become thoroughly implicated in the claims to self-enclosure and self-identity typically associated with vision. In this sense, I posit sonic materiality as a highly fraught, but also extremely rich site for thinking both social relationships and how we relate to ourselves. This relatedness depends, in great part, on the notion of hearing as an ineluctably open sense. And yet, the notion that the ear is the only organ we cannot close – is not, on closer inspection, correct in a few important ways.91 On one hand, we 89

Martin Jay. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in 20th-Century French Thought. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. 90 Jay, 81. 91 Jacques Derrida. The Ear of the Other. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985, 33. 60

cannot “close” our noses or simply suspend the totality of our touch apparatus – the entire body – any more than we can our ears. On the other, the sense of hearing may not be as passive as it is often made out to be – it can, of course, be directed, attuned or focused in number of ways. The Martin Heidegger of Being and Time (1927) proposes hearkening as a specially focused conception of hearing that, taking account of its existential access to the world, can interpret and hear simultaneously. “Dasein,” Heidegger writes, “hears because it understands.”92 For Heidegger, beings-in-theworld (Dasein) broker their relation to that world through a vibrational Stimmung, or attunement, which “provides a metaphysical interval, a space through which certain rhetorical maneuvers can take place…in which individuals can access the spiritual center of the ‘ownmost’ being.”93 Similarly, a special form of hearing, attuned to the hyper-silence of what Heidegger refers to as the “call of conscience” reconnects Dasein with its authentic self in the face of worldly noise.94 In the case studies I examine, this conception of a hearing that understands will undergo significant revision – and the notion that sound has anything to do with self-knowledge will become highly polarizing. 1.4 Immanuel Kant and the Challenge of Open Ear: The Critique of Judgment (1790) and Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798) 92

Martin Heidegger. Being and Time. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. Albany: SUNY Press, 1996, 153. 93 Dyson, 11. 94 Heidegger, Paragraph 57.

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Heidegger’s treatment of hearing in Being and Time reveals and important and counterintuitive potentiality: hearing’s constitutive openness can be marshaled as practice of authentic self-relatedness. Kant’s conflicted treatment of hearing in the Critique of Judgment wagers the opposite: hearing’s openness exposes us to unwanted contact with others. While Kant’s argument mirrors music studies’ interest in musical sound as a force of socialization, he is set against deriving positive social content from that force. Kant understands sound as vibration – and it is precisely vibration that grounds his conflicted and ambivalent attitude toward music. As is well known, Kant asserts that music does not have the representation power to support conceptualization. Thus, it cannot expand the power of judgment. However, it does activate the sensations in a particularly powerful way, emplacing it, with painting, amongst the most powerful “arts of the beautiful play of sensations.” Music’s activation of the senses rests on a derivation of form from sound’s vibrational materiality. As Kant explains, formal unity can “be brought about mathematically under certain rules, because it rests, in the case of tones, on the relation between the vibrations of the air in the same time, so far as these tones are combined simultaneously or successively.”95 These vibrations register as material stimuli. And so, as Cristle Frick points out, “if sensations of color and sound are understood only as material, physical effects on the respective receptor systems, then they can generate only feelings of pleasure or displeasure.”96 In this case, music’s 95 96

Kant, 218. Ibid., 36. 62

“play of sensation” will induce different effects on different listening subjects. But this is less so the case is we think of how those vibrations are formed. Fricke continues, “if these sensations are regarded as forms of intuitions in the form of space and time, and hence as bearers of formal structure…then they offer sufficient points of contact to generate a play of sensations, a mental activity of the cognitive powers and hence utilizing the faculty of judgment.”97 While music’s effects are wildly subjective, its animation of intuition (as something like formed or “patterned”air) justifies its classification with the beautiful arts.98 Kant’s later treatment of hearing in the Anthropology (1798) is slightly different. Kant groups hearing, with sight and smell, as a mediate sense; that is, he thinks that we don’t hear sounding objects themselves, we hear them “through the medium of air that surrounds them.”99 Sound’s material movement thought air, so crucial to Kant’s treatment of music, grounds his understanding of hearing’s capacities. In his complex taxonomy of the senses, Kant groups hearing with sight and touch, claiming that they “contribute more to the cognition of the external object than they stir up the consciousness of the affected organ.”100 That is, hearing draws us toward the nature of a sound-producing thing, not toward the action or activity of the hearing ear itself. And yet, when it comes to specifically musical hearing, Kant changes his position. 97

Ibid., 36. Martin Scherzinger. “Enforced Deterritorialization and the Trouble with Musical Politics.” In Sounding the Virtual: Gilles Deleuze and the Theory and Philosophy of Music. Ed. Brian Hulse and Nick Nesbitt. Surrey: Ashgate, 2010, 104. 99 Immanuel Kant. Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. Trans. and Ed. Robert B. Louden. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, 47. 100 Ibid., 46. 98

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“Music,” Kant writes, “not only moves sense in a way that is indescribably vivacious and varied, it also strengthens it.”101 Contra Kant’s earlier division of the senses, music calls the listener to “consciousness of the affected [ear],” downplaying the ear’s capacity for cognitive activity. Music’s propensity to force this split grounds one of Kant’s most damning (and in a way, funniest) pronouncements on music’s relation to sociality. Kant outlines music’s capacity to cleave the subject from her cognitive projects with significantly more vitriol in the Critique of Judgment than he does in the Anthropology. In fact, in the Anthropology, Kant simply refers to music as an inexhaustible social pleasure, which is “not diminished by the fact that many participate in it.”102 Leaning on the mediacy of sound that will distinguish it from say, touch or taste, in the Anthropology, Kant emphasizes sound’s propensity to circulate freely, without respect for material boundaries. This is a huge problem. …there is attached to music a certain want to urbanity from the fact that, chiefly from the character of its instruments, it extends it influence further than is desired (in the neighborhood), as so as it were obtrudes itself, and does a violence to the freedom of others who are not of the musical company.103

101

Ibid., 47. Ibid., 47. 103 The Critique of Judgment, 219. 102

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And Kant continues this rather unbecoming rant in a footnote, where, he specifies what kind of violence music enacts on thinking subjects, Those who recommend the singing of spiritual songs at family prayers do not consider that they inflict a great deal of hardship upon by the public by such noisy (and therefore in general pharisaical) devotions; for they force the neighbors to either to sing with them or to abandon their meditations.104 Because musical sound disrespects spatial containment and because we cannot turn our ears “away” as we can our eyes, Kant likens sound to smell. “Like an inescapable odor, however pleasant, however agreeable,” John Hamilton explains, “music tracks down everyone in range, rudely and without regard.”105 Not only does sound intrude on Kant, it forces him (the unwilling hearer) to participate in its production – or at the very least, forces him to abdicate thought. In this sense, sound brings the force of sociality to bear on the thinker’s enclosure with what seems to be an unsettling degree of violence. While Kant’s assertion that sound cannot, in fact, precipitate the production of concepts constructs a rigid dualism separating thought and sensation, he fortifies that distinction by opposing thought to (musical) sociality.

104

Ibid., 220. John Hamilton. Music, Madness and the Unworking of Language. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008, 112. 105

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In Kant’s thought, music is an undeniably negative force of socialization, effacing the listeners’ autonomy by compelling him toward social participation. There is not space here, as musicological thinkers of the substantial body might desire, for the production of critical perspectives on music’s action upon the subject. And yet, Kant’s indictment of music through the open ear is exemplary of a broader allocation of passivity to the ear on account of precisely this openness. By way of contrast, I next examine a thinking of vibration that purports to do away with a hierarchy of the senses by theorizing the elemental condition of possibility for sensation; that is Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the flesh. 1.5 Hearing the Flesh of the World: Maurice Merleau Ponty’s Intertwining – The Chiasm (1961) Unlike some of the other thinkers I discuss in this section, Maurice MerleauPonty’s existential phenomenology has gained considerable traction in music studies because of his interest in how our bodily orientation in the world affects, or circumscribes our perceptual capacities. 106 Indeed, Paul Sanden helpfully cites a

106

In their Beyond the Body Proper, Judith Farquhar and Margaret Lock cite MerleauPonty as a key figure in the anthropology of embodiment, citing his Phenomenology of Perception (1962), as foundational text for conceiving “the individual body and the lived world.” They continue, “Merleau-Ponty wants to restore to perception its worldmaking activity and to see the world as an intersection of the various experiences of the embodied, intentional self.” (109) This core of Merleau-Ponty’s project has been especially influential in anthropology and ethnomusicology, circulating through the work of Steven Feld, Don Ihde, Greg Downey, Harris Berger and others. Drawing increasingly nuanced distinctions between my Spinozistic approach and this wellestablished phenomenological approach will be an ongoing task as this project grows. 66

collection of thinkers that use both phenomenology and cognitive science to explain how listeners’ make sense of music through (implied or actual) corporeal involvement.107 While Merleau-Ponty works toward a theory of vision that effaces its rigid separation of seer/seen, subject/object, agency/passivity, his treatment of hearing, based heavily as it is on sound’s vibrational materiality, does not follow suit. MerleauPonty, perhaps unwittingly, offers a compelling case for sound’s production of selfidentical closure within the subject. After contextualizing Merleau-Ponty’s thought and scholarly production, I explicate how this comes to pass. Known for his “oblique and non-adversarial” style of argumentation, MerleauPonty’s phenomenology appears alloyed with a wide rage of interests, including linguistics, politics, psychology and anthropology. Like Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty rejected many Cartesian features of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology. Intended to re-connect perception with the “source of existence and meaning,” Husserl’s eidetic

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As I do, Sanden recognizes the persistence of the mind-body problem in music studies, citing Cusick’s 1994 “Feminist Theory” article, while gesturing toward LeGuin’s “Carnal Musicology” as a viable solution, which he practices in this article by considering Gould’s self-conscious approach to the mind-body problem in his musical thought and practice. Sanden cites Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (1945) as grounding an anti-Cartesian argument for understanding listening as a form of bodily involvement with the production of musical sound. This can take the form of movement as such, imagined movement, empathetic corporeal identification with the performer or semi-conscious imagined performance on the part of the listener herself. These texts include: Arnie Cox. “The Mimetic Hypothesis and Embodied Musical Meaning.” Musicae Scientae (2001)5 (2): 195–212; Andrew Mead. “Bodily Hearing: Physiological Metaphors and Musical Understanding.” Journal of Music Theory (1999) 43 (1): 1–19; Marc Leman. Embodied Music Cognition and Mediation Technology. Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 2008. 67

reduction sets aside “normal perceptual experience” (assumptions that we have about everyday things through our history of interacting with them) in order to gain access to a “more fundamental level of reality.”108 Merleau-Ponty argues that setting aside our “normal” orientation towards does away with the very thing that makes that world intelligible in the first place: our bodily way of being in it. 109 Merleau-Ponty commits himself to rooting out these vestiges of Cartesianism in his own phenomenology. Merleau-Ponty’s articulates his anti-Cartesian position through a thorough critique of Descartes’ understanding of vision. Cartesian perception, as I explain in Chapter 2, has both a material and a mental component, which, like the Cartesian mind and body, share nothing in common. Mereleau-Ponty seeks a unified conception of vision that can, at the same time, account for a worldly depth that Cartesian vision cannot. Thus, in the late text I’ll be looking at, he works toward a relational view of vision that effaces the difference between subject and object as well as seer and seen. Indeed, the immersive characteristics Merleau-Ponty ascribes to vision are more germane to hearing – so much so that Dyson asserts that “Merleau-Ponty’s subject might as well be a listener.”110 Though the transposability that Dyson implies is compelling, I will show the Merleau-Ponty’s anti-Cartesian conception of vision does not translate readily to the register of the aural. Vibration is instrumental in this failure. 108

Jay, 266. Taylor Carmen and Mark C. Hansen. “Introduction.” In The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 110 Dyson, 120. 109

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In his famous unfinished text Intertwining – The Chiasm (pub. pth. 1961) MerleauPonty theorizes perception not from the side of the perceiving subject or the object perceived, but from a third term, which he frames as the infinite and inexhaustible condition of possibility for perception– what he calls the flesh. In the opening of Intertwining, Merleau-Ponty asks how it is that sometimes he feels his gaze originates not in himself, as an agential seer but is given over to him by the objects he sees. He asks, “When does it happen that [looking at visible things] leaves them in their place, that the vision we acquire of [visible things] seems to us to come from them…?”111 Merleau-Ponty wagers that our capacity to see is given over to us by the things that we see. His questions position vision as such between visible things which offer themselves to one another as objects seen. These visibles come to mutually constitute one another as seers. Because the condition of possibility, or, in Merleau-Ponty’s words “latency” of perception lies within this co-constitution of seers and seens, vision as such shuttles infinitely and dynamically between visibles, producing the movement of intertwining that the essay’s titles invokes. Merleau-Ponty continually refers to the gaze’s reciprocal movement as a way that visibles palpate one another, figuring touch and vision and identical and interchangeable. Merleau-Ponty mobilizes the example of the left and right hands touching one another as a way of emplacing the differential relation that structures 111

Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The Visible and the Invisible. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968, 131.

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visuality within the human subject’s relation to her own materiality. When I touch my left hand to my right, both hands become simultaneously toucher and touched. What opens, between both hands and in the relation of the hands to themselves is precisely this divergence – a space of pure difference around which the infinite deferral of toucher to touched and touched to toucher winds itself. This space is the chiasm of this essay’s title – and I will refer to this style of co-constitutive perception as chiasmatic in the course of this discussion. Sense perception draws the perceiving subject outside and beyond herself by locating the very constitution of her corporeality within the world of things. By emplacing our capacity to perceive in the flesh, Merleau-Ponty locates the condition of possibility for perception outside the human subject. 112 As he explains, “[it is to be] 112

Some thinkers see Merleau-Ponty’s flesh as inaugurating a post-human view of perception. Martin Jay asserts that, “[Merleau-Ponty’s] new emphasis on “the flesh of the world” rather than the lived perceiving body meant that the notion of “vision itself began to assume a post-human inflection.”(316) Fleshly perception inculcates a coconstitutive relationship between it participants that does not assume any distinction between the perceiver and perceived, and, by extension, the human and non-human. Similarly, feminist philosopher Elizabeth Grosz understands the flesh to ground an ontological link of “consciousness and knowledge to the complexity of the world” in and through which we can begin to understand our constitutive interaction with inhuman forces. Elizabeth Grosz. Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005, 126. What both Jay and Grosz forget, however, is that the very concept of the flesh derives from Judeo-Christian discourses. As Richard Schusterman explains, Merleau-Ponty’s mobilization of the flesh is in part a recuperative effort; it shared this in common with music studies’ moral antiCartesianism. In Augustine and St. Paul, Schusterman explains, the “flesh” functions as a “traditional pejorative for bodily weakness,” which Merleau-Ponty transforms into a praiseworthy explication of “the body’s special capacity to grasp and commune with the world of sensory things.” (Richard Schusterman. “The Silent, Limping Body of Philosophy.” In Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty. Ed. Taylor Carmen and Mark C. Hansen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, 154.) 70

seen by the outside, to exist within it, to emigrate into it, to be seduced, alienated by the phantom, so that the seer and visible reciprocate one another and we no longer know which sees and which is seen.”113 The logic of the flesh radically effaces the directionality and agency typically ascribed to vision, figuring the visual relation as an immersive dissolution of any stable distinction between seer and seen. Does thinking aural experience through the logic of the flesh, as we ought to be able to do according to Merleau-Ponty’s own mandate, produce a similar restructuring of the relation of hearer to heard? Is it possible to differentiate hearer from heard without contradiction, negation or hierarchical thinking, creating instead a differential relation that is both chiasmatic and reciprocal? Tracking these question through the text bring us, at last, to the role vibration plays in the perceptual world of Intertwining. A helpful editor’s note affirms that Merleau-Ponty was, himself, asking similar questions, implying that there is something about the aural that sits uncomfortably with the flesh and its derivation from vision and touch. After rehearsing the reversibility of the seer and seen as well as the toucher and the touched, MerleauPonty asks himself, what are these adhesions compared with those of the voice and hearing?114 A fleshly thinking of hearing would, like fleshly vision, locate hearing as such within a mutually constitutive engagement between hearer and heard. This would make reading that engagement in a way that prioritizes the hearer’s agency impossible, Insofar as this reading in only intelligible in a thoroughly humanist and theological tradition, it is hard to say that Merleau-Ponty offers a robust post-humanism here. 113 Intertwining, 139. 114 Ibid., 143. 71

much as Merleau-Ponty’s fleshly seer can no longer command the gaze independently of what she sees. Fleshly hearing would be comprised not of hearing subjects and sonic events, but instead, simply, of audibles. Merleau-Ponty begins by attributing sounds to movements within the body, binding the sonorous human to both non-human and inorganic things when he writes, “like crystal, like metal and many other substances, I am sonorous being [.]”115 Here, he implies that sonorousness is immanent to substantiality as such, taking steps toward understanding both humans and non-organic things as audibles. He then, however, makes and abruptly anthropocentric leap, singling the audible human out as the only audible that can experience its own sonorousness, while at the same time linking that experience to a mode of self-relatedness inaccessible to non-human audibles. Directly after his treatment of the sonorousness of crystal and metal Merleau-Ponty writes, “…but I hear my own vibration from within; as [André] Malraux said, I hear myself within my own throat. In this, as he also has said, I am incomparable; my voice is bound to the mass of my own life as is the voice of no one else.”116 Merleau-Pontian seers do not have a privileged relation to their own act of seeing – and much less can they see themselves see in the way that the Merleau-Pontian speaker hears herself speak.

115 116

Ibid., 144. Ibid., 144.

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Indeed, the Merleau-Pontian speaker experiences the vibrational touch of her own voice within her skull and throat, affirming her sovereign self-presence – or, in Malraux’s words, her binding closeness, without remainder, spacing or temporal delay to the mass of her own life. While Merleau-Ponty’s visibles give themselves over to one another without retaining personal or agential control over their visual encounters, Merleau-Ponty’s speakers retain a private experience of their own aural capacities that cannot be shared with or given over to another. In this case, vibrational materiality – the experience of being touched by ones own capacity for vocal production – becomes the site at which Merleau-Ponty’s chiasmatic perception breaks down. Speakers, or audibles more generally, do not – and cannot – give themselves over to one another in equal share. The closest Merleau-Ponty comes to sketching a reversible relation in the register of the audible rests in the speakers’ shared capacity to speak, while this reversibility seems to vaporize in the moment of speech itself. Merleau-Ponty writes, But if I am close enough to the other who speaks to hear his breath and feel his effervescence and his fatigue, I almost witness in him as in myself, the awesome birth of vociferation. As there is a reflexivity of the touch, of sight and of the touch-vision system, there is a reflexivity of the movements of phonation and of hearing; they have in me their sonorous inscription, the vociferations have in me their motor echo.117

117

Ibid., 144. 73

In this dense passage, Merleau-Ponty explains how speakers can register their similarity to one another, but he still cannot show how their shared capacity for vociferation guides them toward a co-constitutive relation. Because Merleau-Ponty does not treat the sonorousness of non-human objects in any detail, it becomes quite difficult to coax a treatment of sonic (as opposed to vocal) materiality out of the text. How, in Merleau-Ponty’s world, can we think of sonic reciprocity with a sonorous thing which does not share the human capacity for speech? Voice becomes the sovereign mode of sonic production in Intertwining. The reversibility of vision and touch emplaces difference and deferral within human corporeality and the world in and through which it operates, but vibrational sound, which Dyson wants to link, as I’ve argued, with the force or production of alterity, emphatically fails to produce a parallel differential action. In Intertwining, vibration guarantees first and foremost the subject’s consistent and inalienable identity with herself. 1.6 Hearing-Oneself-Speak and Lending an Ear: Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy and Peter Szendy (1968-2007) Vibration, thus, seems to open onto two conflictive modes of relationality. Its intractable immediacy and presence engenders, in some logics, an undoing of the bounded self and, in others, an affirmation of the subject’s absolute proximity to herself. These constructions activate two axes of music studies’ treatment of the body.

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On the one hand, vibrational sound effaces the body’s boundaries, opening us to contingency, newness and otherness. On the other however, by addressing the body with the seemingly immediacy presence of touch, vibrational materiality encourages us to experience our bodies with extreme intimacy and immediacy. Is it possible, I’ll ask throughout this project, to conceive of sonic materiality beyond, outside or without this opposition of enclosure to openness? The construction of voice as an index of the speaker’s inalienable self-identity has a long and storied history in philosophy and critical theory. Jacques Derrida may be one of its most famous critics. This critique takes shape against what Derrida calls, after Edmund Husserl, auto-affection. Auto-affection describes how living things signify their identities to themselves. While affirming that “all living things are capable of auto-affection,”118 Derrida brokers his most cogent description through specifically human voices. When we hear ourselves speak, we affirm our identity and self-presence by fantasizing that speaking and hearing are irreducibly immediate. The voice’s vibrational touch yields consciousness of our own self-presence that refuses to admit any openness to difference or contingency. This is how Derrida describes autoaffection as concomitant with speech, One must understand speech in terms of this diagram. Its system requires that it be heard an immediately understood immediately by 118

Jacques Derrida. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1976, 165.

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whoever emits it. It produces a signifier which seems not to fall into the world, outside that ideality of the signified, but to remain sheltered – even at the moment that it attains the audiophonic system of the other – with the pure interiority of auto-affection. It does not fall into the exteriority of space, into what one calls the world, which is nothing but the outside of speech. Within the so-called ‘living’ speech, the spatial exteriority of the signifier seems absolutely reduced.119 By positing that we hear our voice in the very instant that we speak, auto-affective vociferation asserts the speaker’s absolute control over and absolute proximity to what she says, how she says it and how it can be understood. The only exteriority here is what lies outside this circuit – that exteriority has nothing to with how the autoaffective speaker hears herself speak. Auto-affective speech constitutes a refusal of otherness, contingency, exteriority and sociality. In “Tympan,” the introduction to Margins of Philosophy, Derrida grafts this conception of auto-affection onto the materiality of the ear itself. In this context, the speaker’s aural enclosure becomes the listener’s closure against alterity.120 While his introduction is concerned, more broadly, with philosophy’s auto-affective proclivities, Derrida’s insistence on materializing that critique within the ear recapitulates the conjunction of

119

Ibid., 166. Jacques Derrida. “Tympan.” In A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds. Trans. Alan Bass. Ed. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. 120

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vibration and self-relatedness that I have been excavating in this section. Philosophy, Derrida asserts, is motivated by a conceit that it understands everything it hears. Philosophy can, in other words, attune itself such that nothing that falls within its purview complicates its understanding of itself. This is, Derrida argues, exactly how the ear works. As he explains, the tympanic membrane equalizes the pressure between the middle and inner, assuring that nothing reaches the inner ear that could damage it. The tympanum is built to maximize the number and type of vibrational stimuli the ear can incorporate while at the same time purges the threat of difference. The Derridean ear is a closed system that only admits what it is equipped to understand. Like philosophy, it is voracious in its incorporation of what is proper to it.121

121

Through a more detailed examination of the inner ear’s anatomy than the one Derrida attempts in “Tympan,” Veit Erlmann suggests that that Derrida is simply wrong about the tympanic membrane’s function. Erlmann suggests that it’s not the eardrum that equalizes the pressure between the inner and outer ear, but instead the Eustachian tube that connects the inner ear to the mouth cavity. If this is the case, then Derrida’s deconstructive argument loses some aspects of whatever power it gains by purporting to act on the materiality of the ear itself. If, in other words, it’s not the eardrum that actually does the material work of incorporating and neutralizing difference, then Derrida’s talk of metaphysical drumming is little more than a “convenient metaphor.” Viet Erlmann. Reason and Resonance: A History of Modern Aurality. New York: Zone, 2011, 48. Indeed, Derrida himself makes no mention of the Eustachian tube, describing the movement of sound through the ear as “communicating itself between the inner and middle ear following the path of a tube or inner opening, be it round or oval” (Derrida 151). Derrida also insists that the tympanum, which sits separates the auditory canal from the inner is stretch obliquely between the two in order to “increase the surface impressions and hence the capacity of vibration” (Derrida 154). While this is true, it still does not account for the balancing function the Erlmann thinks Derrida applies inappropriately to the eardum, or tympanum.

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Derrida proposes a compelling musical locution for the tympanum’s persistent neutralization of difference: metaphysical drumming.122 No matter how powerfully concepts, questions or objections make strike the ear of philosophy, the properly tuned tympanum will always absorb the blow, transforming alterity’s challenge into unity and sameness. Can critique interrupt this “idealizing erasure of organic difference,” Derrida asks, without destroying the philosophical ear?” 123 While Derrida is asking how it is possible think of the ear as subject to difference and deferral, Veit Erlmann takes this question at face value; “[philosophy],” Erlmann explains, ventriloquizing Derrida, “must pierce the tympanum, unbalance the pressure on either side of the membrane and open itself up to writing.”124 The more interesting challenge – and the challenge that has had the longer trajectory in Derridean thought is the former question: that is, how to think of the ear itself as constituted in and through the movement of difference and deferral? At the beginning of his recent Listening, Jean-Luc Nancy asks a related question, observing (as the Derrida of Tympan does not) a distinction between a listening that hears (écouter) and listening that understands (entendre). Heidegger, as I’ve shown, guides Dasein towards the latter as a mode of authentic being-in-the world. Nancy’s critique encompasses both Derrida’s understanding of the ear as a site for the erasure of difference and the authentic concentricity of hearing and understanding that 122

Derrida, 152. Derrida, 156. 124 Erlmann, 48. 123

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Heidegger proposes. In Nancy’s hands, Heidegger’s ratification of this relation and Derrida’s parallel rejection are merely two positions the same problem. “Hasn’t philosophy,” Nancy asks, “superimposed upon listening beforehand and of necessity, or else substituted for listening, something else that might be more on the order of understanding?”125 By intervening on this presumptive understanding, Nancy cleaves a distinction between the materiality of the ear (its openness) and its actions and capacities (its ability to listen closely or passively). For the ear, this doubled-task is encrypted in the verb entendre, which is typically translated to mean both “to hear” and “to understand.” For Nancy, the ear becomes a resonant site at which hearing and understanding continually defer from and refer to one another, posing the “listening” subject as form of resonant reference of meaning to sound and sound to meaning. Through Nietzsche, Derrida does bring this Nancian resonance between hearing and its modalities of “tension, intention and attention” to bear on the ear’s relationship to power.126 In a late, little-read collection of discussions, lectures and interviews, Otobiographies: The Ear of the Other, Derrida conceives speech and hearing as a form of un-repayable debt through the action of lending an ear. The ear becomes tender, here, in two senses of the word. First, it becomes a site of openness and vulnerability to others. Second, it becomes a medium of exchange. Playing with the locution “to lend an ear,” Derrida treats speech as a mode of indebtedness to another. 125

Jean-Luc Nancy. Trans. Charlotte Mandell. Listening. New York: Fordham University Press, 2007, 1. 126 Ibid., 6.

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We can be heard by another only insofar as she lends us her ear – only insofar, that is, as we enter her debt. This is a debt that can be repeated and reiterated, but never actually settled. Our ears, in this sense, are always-already on loan to speakers in the social, cultural and political fields and others’ ears are, similarly, always-already loaned to us. Between Derrida and Nancy, listening becomes a site of a relational deferral and unavoidable debt. Precisely because the ear is indefatigably open, we are alwaysalready listening, and thus, in a certain sense, under injunction to listen. Working with this now-familiar openness, Peter Szendy interrogates how we lay claim to our identities as listeners, through listening. “How,” Szendy asks, “can listening become my own, identifiable as my own, while still continuing to answer to the unconditional injunction of a you must?”127 Are the ear’s constitutive referrals of listening to understanding and its accrual of debt in our envoiced engagement with others actually communicable or expressible? Szendy’s line of questioning unsettles the unique irreducibility of voice that grounds Cavarero’s “envoiced” politics of the local. For Szendy, and the deconstructive tradition in which he follows, there simply is no a priori claim to vocal or aural uniqueness that does not arrive already contaminated or partially constituted by the other.

127

Peter Szendy. Listening: A History of Our Ears. Trans. Charlotte Mandell. New York: Fordham University Press, 2007, 3.

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In response to the ear’s constitutive openness (itself a placeholder for a broader conception of being-in-the world), Nancy explores listening as a form of “stretching the ear” that intensifies our “care, curiosity and anxiety” about that being.128 Derrida takes a much more urgent approach to this Nancian practice of aural elasticity. Through Nietzsche, Derrida prescribes modes of listening that protect the vulnerable ear from institutional power: “Your ears grow larger and you turn into long-eared asses, when, instead of listening with small, finely tuned ears and obeying the best master and the best of leaders, you think you are free and autonomous with respect to the state…having become all ears for this phonograph dog, you transform yourself into a high-fidelity receiver.”129 Derrida ultimately will demand, then, that we listen with what Nietzsche calls the third ear. The “third ear” accesses affective content, secret wishes and occulted directives from within the “official” discursive content of speech. The third ear prioritizes the materiality of speech (its timbre, contour, timing, articulation) over its signifying content, thereby giving us access to the truth of discourse through its paralinguistic features. 130 While the concept of the third ear bears tremendous power in a 128

Nancy. 5. Ibid., 35. 130 Beyond Good and Evil (VIII, 245-248). In his post-Freudian texts on method, psychoanalyst Theodor Reik mobilizes the Nietzschean third ear to describe psychoanalytic listening. This mode of listening seeks evidence of unconscious wishes beneath discursive speech, which Reik describes as the connection of the analyst and analysand’s unconscious with one another. Theodor Reik. Listening With the Third Ear: The Experiences of a Psychoanalyst. New York: Farrar Straus, 1949. 129

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psychoanalytic context, Nietzsche associates it with femininity through an unflattering association of feminine listening with subrational and pararational priorities. By attending to the material features of speech, the feminine third ear hears the complete affective meaning of an utterance, bringing to light what discursive language occults. However, by accessing these affective truths nested within discourse, the third ear proposes a prophylactic mode of listening that guards and protects the open ear against uncritical immersion within what Derrida calls, with Nietzsche, degenerate forces: institutional power in its variegated forms and modes of circulation. This power comes to us lodged in the hollow of words.

1.7 Conclusion But this power also comes to us lodged in musical sound. Or, that is one of the claims through which substantial and desubstantial approaches like those of McClary and (from a slightly different angle) Richard Leppert place bodies at the center of musical sociality. Anti-Cartesian polemics yoke bodies to a constellation of progressive capacities: the production of irreducible knowledge, difference and resistance. However, suspending this polemic in order to trace the conjunction of sonic and bodily materialities reveals a much more fragmented vision of how sound might dispose us towards knowledge, ourselves, sociality and power more broadly. While vibration is itself situated undecidably between process and object, its effects, in the

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hands of Kant, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, Nancy and Szendy, articulate an equally undecidably opposition between openness and closure. This opposition shows a tremendously ambivalent relation between bodily and vibrational materiality. Rigid anti-Cartesianism neutralizes this undecidability as a matter of strategy. The challenge, here, for McClary, LeGuin and Hahn, is to produce a body imbued with political and epistemological powers on an a priori basis. For Abbate, the abiding alchemic force of the performing body makes the question of sonic materiality irrelevant. For the Cusick of “Feminist Theory,” the body’s capacity to know (and the fidelity to that capacity that we are supposed to maintain) does not depend on one construction of sonic materiality over another. I proposes something different: thinking Spinozistically about musical materiality (here, understood as the conjunction of sound with bodies) makes possible a thinking of bodily powers alongside their modulation with and against sonic materiality. Spinoza’s philosophy offers a compelling account of the body’s constitutive relation to the mind that makes possible an understanding of bodily action as constitutive of mental processes. A radical rejection of the anti-Cartesian moral imperative to celebrate the body is immanent to Spinoza’s refiguration of the mind-body union. What new moral or ethical coordinates for embodied musical practice become possible when our research object does arrive always-already in need of recuperation? In order for its overcoming to make sense in its broadest scope and complexity, dualism itself needs richer context and more thorough explication than its

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programmatic rejection in music studies usually entails. This programmatic rejection, as I’ve shown, posits dualism and musical practice (variously construed) as antithetical to one another. Reading Descartes with a special interest in music and the body reveals that the separation of mind and body that is, of course, dualism’s hallmark, is actually latent within Descartes’ early understanding of musical practice and musical experience.

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Chapter Two Descartes’ Musical Secret and the Art of Defending Mind-Body Dualism

2.0 Introduction As often as the Cartesian opposition of mind to body re-inscribes itself in music studies, there is relatively little engagement with how dualism formation’s actually worked. In the previous chapter, I argued for a re-organization of the critical priorities through which music studies approaches the body. That is, rather than treating dualism’s denigration of the body as its primary offense (and as a highly charged site for politicized critique), I suggest critical focus on mind-body interaction and the mind-body union. Why? In an intellectual historical sense, this approach isolates problems whose solutions will become crucial to the overcoming of dualism toward which this project moves. On the way to that goal, I chose an expressly aesthetic route through Descartes’ voluminous oeuvre in order to assess how the double challenge of mind-body interaction and unification articulates itself through Descartes’ treatment of music and the visual arts in the Compendium of Music (1618), the Optics (1637) the Meditations on First Philosophy (1641). A summary of recent musicological engagements with dualism might go something like this: music is undeniably produced by bodies and ineluctably addressed to bodies. While the notion that music as such calls a two-world metaphysic into question packs considerable polemic firepower, Descartes’ own treatment of music demonstrates

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precisely the opposite: Descartes’ conception of musical experience reproduces (or, perhaps better, presages) dualism’s principles and problems. Simply put, musical experience might be implicated in dualism’s very formation. This line of inquiry will, at times, orbit well-known summaries of Descartes’ infamous motto: cogito ergo sum. As the story typically goes, cogito ergo sum affirms the subject’s identity and integrity exclusively through her capacity to think. Her embodied life has no share in the affirmation. By taking an aesthetic approach to dualism, this chapter underscores a parameter of the cogito rarely explored in music studies’ variegated indictments of Descartes. At the beginning of Meditation Three, Descartes enumerates the mental activities that the cogito encompasses. The internal and ‘silent’ speech act by which “I think” comes to confirm that “I exist” also includes Descartes’ understanding that he “is a thing that thinks, a think that doubts, affirms, understands a few things, affirms, denies, understands a few things, is ignorant of many things, is willing, unwilling and also which imagines and has sensory perceptions.”131 Here, Descartes ascribes both mental activities (willing, affirming and denying) and passive states (ignorance, sense perception) to the same process of thinking. If, as Timothy Reiss suggests, part of Descartes’ challenge in the Meditation is transforming the person from a “place in which thinking happens” into an agential

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The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Volume II. Trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff and Dugald Murdoch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Henceforth, citations from the three volume set will be abbreviated “CSM,” and will include the Volume and pages numbers. CSM II, 24.

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subject who can reflect on her capacity to think, then all of these actions (including sense perception) should have a share in the foundation of that agency.132 In dialogue with Marin Mersenne in the Second Replies, Descartes’ formalizes this collection of mental activities as the very definition of cogitatio – that is, of thinking. He writes, “I use this term [cogitatio] to include everything that is within us in such a way that we are immediately conscious of it. Thus all the operations of the will, the intellect, the imagination and the senses are thoughts.”133 Music studies’ treatment of the cogito tends to overlook the complex claim that sense perception constitutes a form of thinking. “Perception,” Daniel Heller-Roazen explains, “was in every sense an act of the representing, conscious and thinking ‘I’; for [Descartes] every sensation was, in other words, an act of cognition.”134 Breaking with Aristotelian theories of perception, Descartes’ sees perception as the production of mental images that bear no qualitative relation to existent objects outside the mind. In the first few sections of this chapter, I’ll explicate how the relation between the senses and the soul in the Compendium grounds this separation, which is later fully articulated in the Meditations. This argument locates the beginnings of the cogito within Descartes’ musical thought.

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Timothy Reiss. Mirages of the Selfe: Patterns of Personhood in Ancient and Early Modern Europe. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003, 482. 133 CSM II, 113. 134 Daniel Heller-Roazen. The Inner Touch: Archaeology of a Sensation. New York: Zone, 2007, 165.

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While it may be the most obvious, the relation between the senses and the soul is not the Compendium’s only crypto-dualist implication. Through focusing my reading of the Compendium, in part, on Descartes’ formative friendship with Isaac Beeckman, I demonstrate how Descartes projects dualism into the social field through the figure of the friend. Routing these connections back into my reading of the Compendium, I also posit them as an important point of contrast with Spinoza’s immanently social conception of reason in Chapters 3 and 4. While music and sound imply a nascent dualism in the Compendium, the pictorial arts articulate the conception of thought that grounds its mature and robust formulation in the Meditations. And yet, in correspondence with Princess Elizabeth, Descartes proposes a role for the senses in the context of the mind-body union that I think opens a compelling connection between the Compendium and Descartes’ mature philosophical positions. Elizabeth highlights precisely the problems with interaction that I’ve proposed thus far. Her challenges to Descartes – and my musical speculation about those challenges – conclude this chapter, setting the stage for dualism’s overcoming. 2.1 Contextualizing the Compendium (1618) I have surprised many students and colleagues with the apparently surprising fact that Descartes’ first complete manuscript was about music theory. The text was dedicated to Descartes’ friend and early collaborator Isaac Beeckman, and in the text’s

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closing dedication Descartes begs Beeckman never to show it to anyone. Why this secrecy? And what could interest the thinker of the cogito in the bodily experience of

playing, listening or dancing to music? Scholarly reception of the Compendium seems to take three different forms: Ignore the it completely, treat it as a vestige of Renaissance metaphysics (thus separating it from Descartes’ properly philosophical corpus), or read it as a rough, experimental prototype of Descartes’ mature positions on the senses, the mind, mechanism and mathematics. Though I take a nuanced version of the latter position, each comes with compelling logics of justification, rife with assumptions about what Cartesian musicality ought to be like. Indeed, in my initial work on the Compendium I hoped to discover support for music studies’ claim that music is simply opposed to dualism; I hoped to encounter a Descartes who was forced to relinquish the specter of mind-body separation in the face of musical experience. This, as I’ll show, is not at all the case. In the opening of her “Descartes on Musical Training and the Body,” Kate van Orden briefly indulges in similar speculation, only to abandon it in favor of a compelling treatment of the Compendium as a cultural document about bodily discipline in Descartes’ historical moment. But her opening gambits about Descartes’ anomalous engagement with the body are telling. The text is full of pleasure-seeking listeners, feelingful dancers and singing bodies, but those pleasures are explicated through mathematics and mechanics. And though Descartes’ certainly doesn’t cleave

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the mind from the body in any explicit way in the text, the association of the body with mechanization that he wagers in the Compendium will emerge later as evidence for its distinction from the mind. 135 Even so, van Orden interprets Descartes’ empirical approach (that is, the approach that supports his mechanist view) as part of broader democratization of musical knowledge at work in the early modern period. She writes, Descartes disregards ancient and Renaissance authorities (there is no prerequisite reading for his course), intellectual, professional, social and moral hierarchies and largely banished and even the class distinction implicit in the elevated status of vocal polyphony crumble when he heaps praise on the simplest music around – military drumming.136 If the locus of musical knowledge rests in the senses then it will be best understood though reflection on sense experience, not through textual authorities or social directives. Van Orden aptly connects this position with Descartes’ famous framing exhortation from the Discourse on Method (1637): “what we properly call ‘good sense’ or ‘reason’ is common to all men.”137 Though at the time of writing the

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Kate van Orden. “Descartes on Musical Training and the Body.” In Music, Sense and Sensuality. Ed., Linda Phyllis Austern. New York: New York, 2002. By way of acknowledging the body’s tense position in the Compendium, van Orden writes. “[the world of Descartes’ Compendium] is still far from the philosopher’s celebrated dislocation of mind and body, even while the intellectual method by which he would arrive there is very much on the horizon” (17). 136 Ibid., 19. 137 CSM, I, 111.

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Compendium, Descartes is not yet in a position to tell us how to harness that rational capacity, he seems prepared to distribute it within musical experience. But this call to reflection on the relation of perceiver and perceived ushers in a host of new problems. Bernard Augst and Jairo Moreno, in different ways, locate the Compendium’s modern character in Descartes’ treatment of precisely this relation. By rejecting the apparatus of Aristotelian physics in the Compendium, Augst explains, Descartes’ posits sense perception as the only real link between the perceiving subject and the world. By so doing, Augst explains, Descartes’ submits the perceived object and sensory perception to mathematical scrutiny, working toward a quantitative approach to the senses.138 Jairo Moreno suggests that this quantitative approach emerges more gradually that Augst acknowledges. Moreno argues that Descartes’ separation of subject from object requires a parallel account of the mathematical continuity by which, on the one hand, objects conform to the sense’s perceptual abilities and, on the other, the senses meet the demands of their objects. By imbuing the subject with the capacity to reflect on this relationship, the Descartes of the Compendium “begins also to define the subject epistemologically, in terms of its capacity for grounding knowledge.”139 If, as Tim Reiss implies, part of Descartes’ primary challenges in the Meditations is the explication of thinking as the work of an 138

Bertrand Augst. “Descartes’ Compendium of Music.” In Journal of the History of Ideas. Vol. 26, No. 1 (Jan- March, 1965), pp. 119-132, 122. 139 Jairo Moreno. Musical Representations, Subjects and Objects: The Construction of Musical Thought in Zarlino, Descartes, Rameau and Weber. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004, 62.

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active and self-reflexive agent, Moreno sees that project already in play within the Compendium. According to Augst, one of the main reasons the Compendium is ignored by Descartes scholarship is its association with what he calls “Natural Philosophy” ! that is, with theories of occult sympathy and natural magic. Antonio Negri uses this tense co-existence of quality with quantity to contextualize Descartes’ break with Renaissance metaphysics.140 Using the Compendium as a starting point, Negri argues that Descartes’ use of metaphor is drawn from Renaissance metaphysics, even though the content thereby expressed is thoroughly modern in character. Cartesian metaphors, Negri maintains, are univocal in the sense that doesn’t just describe a rational formation of being – they enact rationality as such.141 “This kind of metaphor is not a means, but a proper form of experience, not an illusion but an effective guide…this 140

Antonio Negri. Trans. Matteo Mandarini and Alberto Toscano. Political Descartes: Reason, Ideology and Bourgeois Project. London: Verso, 2007. 141 By thinking of metaphor as univocal, I take Negri to mean that whatever is expressed through both the metaphor’s terms can be predicated equally of both of them. Duns Scotus, for example, (frequently cited as a paradigmatically univocal thinker, against Aquinas’ equivocity) makes no qualitative distinction between the human and the divine. Thus, when we say that “God is good” and that “so and so human being is good,” we mean that they are good in the same way, but in differing degrees. Negri isolates three different kinds of metaphors in Descartes that depict the pursuit of reason as: 1) walking a path, 2) building a house and 3) operating a machine. Focusing on the metaphor of rebuilding a house with a weak foundation from the Discourse, Negri asserts that reconstruction of the house is rational in the same way that it is rational to reconstruct knowledge on indubitable beliefs after discarding fallible ones. Both articulate the same need for security, thus framing mental and material project as expressive of the same kind of rationality. This “expression” of a single aspect of being through multiple modes will become important in my treatment of Spinoza in Chapters 3 and 4.

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metaphor leads us into being at the same time as it expresses being’s structure.”142 Cartesian metaphors distribute mathematical rationality throughout experience. Thus, we can bring that rationality into existence through both our mental and material actions upon and within the world. This position is radically inconsistent with Descartes’ two-world metaphysic, threatening, Negri argues, to undermine the foundational tenets of Descartes’ epistemology and ontology. While I am not going to assess the viability of this claim here, Negri’s argument make a compelling intervention in the contemporary reception of the Compendium by using the text to position Descartes’ thought at the threshold of Renaissance metaphysics and early modernity. In his Reason and Resonance, Veit Erlmann mobilizes a different set of oppositions to a similar end. While Negri claims that Renaissance metaphor facilitates Descartes’ articulation of early modern rationality, Erlmann argues that Cartesian reason co-exists with what he calls “resonance.” Transposing Martin Jay’s distinction between hearing and vision onto reason and resonance, this is how Erlmann describes their opposition. While reason implies the disjunction of subject and object, resonance involves their conjunction. Where reason requires separation and autonomy, resonance entails adjacency, sympathy

142

Negri, 33. 93

and the collapse of the boundary between the perceiver and perceived.143 Under this logic, reason is modern, equivocal, quantitative and mental, while resonance is pre-modern, univocal, qualitative and sensual. Erlmann is out to upset this network of binary relations, demonstrating that “modern aurality [did not evolve] in the shadow of reason, but within a large context in which the history of reason and the history of the senses often run parallel.”144 In the case of Descartes, Erlmann argues, hearing is more important to the formulation of the cogito than standard readings of the Meditations might imply. He rests this argument on an interpretation of the Compendium as equal parts “method and reason” and “material and irrationality.”145 And yet, the textual figures that Erlmann associates with these latter resonant irruptions appear later in Descartes’ corpus as paradigmatic examples of dualist thinking. If this is, indeed, the case, is Erlmann’s reading of the Compendium justified? Erlmann focuses his argument about the Compendium on the passages that frame the text. Though he devotes considerable energy, as will I, to the Compendium’s hands-on approach to sound’s vibrational materiality, the text’s rhetorical frame is

143

Viet Erlmann. Reason and Resonance: A History of Modern Aurality. New York: Zone, 2011, 30. 144 Ibid., 30. 145 Ibid., 45.

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equally important to his reading. Here, I will quote the text’s opening statement and its closing dedication. First, Descartes informs us, The basis of music is sound; its aim is to please and to arouse various emotions in us…the means to this end, i.e. the attributes of sound are principally two, namely its difference of duration or time and its difference of tension, for high to low.…the human voice seems most pleasing to us because it is most directly attuned to our souls. By the same token, the voice of a close friend is more agreeable than the voice an enemy because of sympathy and antipathy of feelings – just as it is said a sheep-skin stretched over a drum will not give forth any sound when struck is a wolf’s hide of another drum is struck at the same time.146 At the text’s closing, Descartes offers this loving dedication – and rather desperate plea for secrecy – to Beeckman, the text’s dedicatee. I am already close to land, hurrying ashore; I have omitted a great deal in an endeavor to be concise – much because I have forgotten, but most, without doubt, because of ignorance. Yet, I permit this immature offspring of my mind to read you although it is an 146

Rene Descartes. Trans. Walter Robert. Compendium of Music. Musicological Studies and Documents, 1961, 11.

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uncouth as a new-born baby bear, to serve as a token of our friendship and as unmistakable proof of my love for you. I beg of you, however, that it remain forever hidden in privacy of your desk drawer; it should not be submitted to the judgment of others. For they may not, as I trust you will, turn from these fragments and look with good will at those writings in which at least some characteristics of my talent find accurate expression. They would not know that this booklet was hastily written for your sake only, in the midst of turmoil and uneducated soldiers by a man without occupation or office, busy with entirely different thoughts and activities.147 Descartes’ opening gambit suggests a rich conflict in his approach to the effects of musical sound. Indeed, he affirms in the Compendium’s first sentence that music’s principal object is the production of pleasure, decisively ignoring the popular NeoPlatonic association of music with moral education. And yet, Descartes offers two conflicting models for understanding musical pleasure. The first is embedded in the loving voice of the friend to whom we are sympathetically disposed. This is a qualitative pleasure, activating a resonant sympathy between two beings that appear to be always-already compatible. The second pleasure is purely quantitative, derived from what Descartes understand to be sound’s two principal attributes: duration and

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Compendium, 53. 96

register.148 These parameters, Descartes recommends, should be studied mathematically. For Erlmann, it’s the figure of the friend that brings resonance into play within the Compendium’s otherwise quantitative and rational frame. Rather than show, in a typically deconstructive fashion, that reason disavows its dependence on an irrational Other, Erlmann wants to show that the Compendium does precisely the opposite. “It is as though these passages were meant to enclose the Compendium’s rational core in friendship, sympathy and resonance,” he writes, concluding that “…it is not rational discourse that surrounds, confines or contains its other.”149 Erlmann’s alliance of friendship with resonance is, on my read, a bit hasty. What kind of friendship does the Compendium refer to? And what does friendship mean to Descartes in the first place? By engaging these questions (as Erlmann defers from doing), I offer a two-part frame for my own examination of the Compendium. First, I mobilize the figure of the friend to examine the biographical conditions of the Compendium’s production and, second, I explicate how Descartes’ dualism informs his understanding of friendship in the first place. 2.2 Isaac Beeckman and the Early Mathematization of the World: 1618-1619 Erlmann’s invocation of the friend draws a strong but oblique connection linking the Compendium with Descartes’ mature correspondence, where Descartes describes

148 149

Ibid., 11. Ibid., 46. 97

the foundation of friendship using the dualistic mind-body union as a heuristic. Contra Erlmann, I show that the Cartesian friend functions as a complex site for the workingout of dualism’s challenges. And this is not least the case when it is come to the friend to whom Descartes dedicated the text. As I’ll show, this particular friendship is foundational for Descartes’ early commitment to a developing a mathematic method for studying the world. Descartes wrote the Compendium between 1618 and 1619, shortly after beginning what would become a formative intellectual friendship with amateur mathematician Isaac Beeckman. Descartes met Beeckman in November of 1618 while he was stationed at Breda in The Netherlands during his tenure in the army of Prince Maurice of Nassau. As Steven Gaukroger helpfully recounts, Beeckman (seven years Descartes’ elder) and Descartes quickly recognized a shared interest in using mathematics to solve problems in physics. Shortly after meeting Descartes in 1618, Beeckman’s diary entry documents his delight at meeting Descartes precisely because, “physico-mathematicians are very rare, [Descartes says] that he has never met anyone like myself who pursues his studies in the way that I do, combining mathematics and physics in an exact way. And for my part, I have never spoken with anyone apart from him who studies in this way.”150 Clearly, it is no coincidence, that Descartes will begin developing his mathematical view of physics in collaboration with Beeckman.

150

Gaukroger, Stephen. Descartes: An Intellectual Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995, 69.

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Descartes worked on three intellectual projects in association with Beeckman: a manuscript about free fall and another about the behavior of water, in addition to the Compendium.151 Comparing these efforts, Augst identifies only the Compendium with “meaningful scientific experimentation,” while the former works were concerned with analyzing extant “mechanical experiences.”152 In the canonist tradition, Descartes’ carries out his sonic experiments upon this monochord’s single string, rejecting Beeckman’s corpuscular view of sound.153 While Descartes modeled the Compendium in large part on Zarlino’s Istitutioni harmoniche (1558), with which he would have familiar from his studies at the Jesuit college La Fleche from 1606-1614, Descartes radically revised Zarlino’s approach to the monochord.154 Zarlino, “the good

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Gaukroger, 69. Augst, 123. 153 According to Gaukroger, Beeckman thought that sound was made of atom-sized bodies defined by elasticity, speed and movement. Atomist views, in contrast, identify sound’s minimal units through static attributes like shape and size (72). Beeckman explained consonance by “arguing that sound ‘globules’ were emitted from a vibrating string only intermittently, and that the periods of sound and silence coincided only when notes of the same frequency were sounded together simultaneously, the two periods becoming less regular in relation to one another as the intervals between the two notes moves across the spectrum from consonance to dissonance” (74). 154 H.F. Cohen. Quantifying Music: The Science of Music at the First Stage of the Scientific Revolution, 1580-1650. Boston: D. Reidel, 1984, 163. In a wonderful and detailed account, Cohen contrasts Descartes’ mathematical fidelity to Zarlino with Johannes Kepler’s approach to consonance in his Harmonice Mundi (1619). Cohen writes, “while Kepler rejected the arithmetical analysis of consonance in order to replace it with original geometric considerations, Descartes much less radically transformed Zarlino’s numerical magnitudes into line segments of given lengths” (163). So, as Cohen claims, while Kepler tried to develop a new numerical derivation for consonances (“he analyzed the fifth as the ratio of residue and whole of the arcs of circle cut off by an equilateral triangle”) Descartes developed a new acoustic method for demonstrating an already well-established position. 152

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Platonist,” treated the sounding divisions of the string as mere “images of the numerical rations he believed to be the cause of musical consonance.”155 For Descartes, “string segments [became] the true foundation of sounds and numbers only a description.”156 By identifying pitch with sound and not number, Descartes replaced Neo-Platonic musical cosmology with an empirical and acoustical approach. This materialist conception of pitch and interval, as I’ll show, becomes crucial in articulating the crypto-dualism that seethes beneath the Compendium’s surface. The Compendium catalyzes a dense period of reflection on what a method for replacing a physics of qualities with mathematical quantities might look like.157 Between 1618 and 1619, this reflection appears in a wide range of material, ranging from letters, dreams, chance encounters and early drafts of the Rules for the Direction of the Mind.158 With the Compendium’s mathematical integrity very much in mind, on 26 March 1619, Descartes writes to Beeckman expressly to declare his intention to generate a method for studying all physical phenomena as mathematical quantities. 159

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Thomas Christensen. Rameau and Musical Thought in the Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, 77. 156 Ibid., 77. 157 Augst, 124. 158 As Gaukroger helpfully points out, the Rules for the Regulation of Mind (which we not published until after Descartes death) we once thought to have been composed in 1628, but now “there is good reason to suppose that the Regulae were composed between 1619-20 and 1626-8, and that a number of stages of composition are evident, some of the Rules comprising material composed at very different times” (Gaukroger 111) This will become important in section 2.2 because it dates the composition of the early Rules very close to Descartes’ completion of the Compendium. 159 As Descartes tells Beeckman in his letter of 24 January 1619, “if you look carefully at what I wrote on discords and the rest of my treatise on music, you will find all of 100

Let me be quite open about the nature of my project. What I want to produce is not something like Lull’s Ars Brevis, but rather a completely new science, which would provide a general solution of all possible equations involving any sort of quantity, whether continuous or discrete according to its nature. I am hoping to demonstrate what sorts of problems can be solved in this or that way, so that almost nothing in geometry will remain to be discovered. This is of course a gigantic task, and one hardly suitable for one person; indeed, it is an incredibly ambitious project. But through the dark chaos of science I have caught a glimpse of some sort of light and with the aid of this, I think I shall be able to dispel even the thickest of obscurities.160 Catalan philosopher and evangelist Ramon Lull’s (1232-1316) voluminous output included texts on the arts, rhetoric, Christian theology and logic.161 Lull uses ars to designate nearly all objects of knowledge, including, the human body, fate and

the points I made on the intervals of harmonies, scales and discords were demonstrated mathematically.” CSM III, 1. 160 CSM III, 5. 161 Mark D. Johnston. The Evangelical Rhetoric of Ramon Lull. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, 4.

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fortune, mechanics, grammar, logic and rhetoric.162 Lull’s work aims to “define a single, unitary system for all learning,”163 thus proffering a universal method for problem solving. While Lull’s universal method is driven by theology, the universal method that Descartes will propose is, of course, driven by mathematics. Lull appears yet again in Descartes’ correspondence with Beeckman a little over a month later. In a letter from 29 April 1619, Descartes recounts debating a Lullist devotee in a Dordrecht inn. This loquacious conversationalist, “boasted that he was able to apply Lull’s method, and to do this so skillfully that he could talk for an hour on any subject you cared to mention, and if he was required to talk for a further hour on the same topic, he would find fresh things to say and could even continue for twenty-four hours at a stretch.”164 On Descartes rendering, Lull’s epistemological system offers a seemingly infinite method for generating knowledge and concepts. Through his opposition to Lull, we see Descartes register and the re-conceptualize what a universal method might look like and how it might be accomplished. To Beeckman, Descartes intimates that he first grasped his quantitative worldview through a qualitative one, supporting Negri’s claim that Renaissance metaphysics forms the condition of possibility for Descartes’ modern thought.

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The Ars Brevis to which Descartes refers is actually a summary of Lull’s larger work Ars Generalis Ultima. In this text, Lull defines art as, “a plan established for knowing the purpose of something about which one desires knowledge” (Johnston 21). Lull’s Ars Generalis purports to unify all knowledge by retracing it to theology utilizing “general principles [that] embrace the principles from all branches of learning” (20). 163 Johnston, 21. 164 CSM III, 4-5. 102

For all this engagement with universality through the Lullian occult in the early months of 1619, by the far the most famous event in Descartes’ formulation of a universal method is a series of three dreams from around 10 November 1619. The dreams were recorded by Descartes’ first biographer Adrian Baillet and the documents upon which they were based are now lost.165 Throughout all of this, is it now known that Descartes had begun drafting the Rules for the Direction of the Mind as early as 1619, dating portions of the Rules quite close to the Compendium. Descartes’ March letter to Beeckman regarding Lull’s Ars Brevis implies that at this time Descartes was becoming increasingly convinced that “knowledge had to be placed on a different footing.”166 Descartes’ search for a method by which this might be accomplished compelled him to withdraw from the company of others, ultimately forcing him into a state of what Baillet calls joyful, yet exhausted delirium.167 Going to sleep on the night of 10 November 1619, after having “convinced himself that he had discovered the wondrous foundations of a new science,” Descartes has three dreams that supposedly confirm that this is true.168 The first two dreams instigate bodily and sensory chaos; in the first, Descartes dreams of terrible phantasms and bodily pain, in the second, he sees sparks which attenuate his vision. The third dream reconstitutes this disorder (which Descartes interprets as a reprimand for his past life), presenting images of encyclopedias, dictionaries and a familiar verse of Austonius: what road in life shall I

165

Gaukroger, 106. Ibid., 106. 167 Ibid., 106. 168 Ibid., 106. 166

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follow?169 Descartes takes this third and final dream as confirmation that it was his “destiny to produce a new mathematical and scientific system.”170 Indeed, though Descartes’ engagement with Beeckman did cover occult matters, that engagement is thoroughly occupied with the development of a mathematical method for studying the world. Does this trajectory, which forms a large part of Compendium’s intellectual milieu, place the text on the side of Erlmann’s resonance? I don’t think so. I turn now to the figure of the friend upon whose shoulders Erlmann places this argument. In what does remain of Descartes’ record of these dreams, he offers the following aphorism on friendship after documenting the third dream’s Ausonius verse: “We desire praise from those who do not know us, but from friends, we want the truth.”171 Even in these early texts, the friend is an agent for the production of certainty.

2.3 Dualism and Rational Love In Descartes’ later correspondence, as well as in his final manuscript The Passions of the Soul (1649), he theorizes friendship using a logic similar to that which defines the Cartesian mind-body relation.172 With Genevieve Lloyd’s help, in this section, I’ll

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“Quod vitae sectabor iter?” CSM I, 5. Ibid., 5. 171 Ibid., 5. 172 Genevieve Lloyd. Providence Lost. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008. Lloyd discusses this part-whole relationship extensively in “The Philosopher and the Princess,” her chapter on Descartes intellectual relationship with Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia. 170

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show that the Cartesian body’s contingent relationship to the mind reappears in Descartes’ understanding of the personal and social unions we create through what he calls rational love.173 My discussion of rational love is drawn largely from Descartes’ mature correspondence with Alphonse Pollot, Hector-Pierre Chanut and Queen Cristina of Sweden, much of which Lloyd also discusses in detail.174 This contingency comes into sharp focus through the figure of the friend, casting dualism’s long shadow backward upon to the friend who frames the Compendium. This friend is no longer, as Erlmann might have it, the resonant other to Descartes’ cogito. To say that Descartes’ “translates” the logic of the mind-body union into the register of rational love doesn’t quite capture how intimately linked these two registers actually are. It’s not, in other words, the case that mind-body union and rational love are analogically related, but that our experience of the mind’s union with the body conditions how we understand and experience love for others. Descartes defines rational love as the formation of a mutually beneficial union in which both parties

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CSM III, 306. Pollot (1602-68) was a gentleman-in-waiting to the Prince of Orange and he became acquainted with Descartes through sending him objections to the Discourse and the Essays in 1638. Chanut (1601-62) mediated Descartes’ correspondence with Queen Cristina of Sweden, and urged him to accept her invitation to join her court in Stockholm in 1649. Queen Christina (1626-89) corresponded with Descartes for the last three years of his life. Their correspondence centered on drafts of his Passions of the Soul, which Descartes later dedicated to her. Descartes last work was text for a ballet in honor of her birthday which is now lost. CSM III, 386-7. 174

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adopt one another’s needs and desires as their own.175 Like the mind’s union with the body, however, the unions we form through rational love are contingent. As Descartes’ demonstrates in the Meditations, epistemological certainty takes priority over the integrity of the mind-body union. The body can, and indeed, must be set aside when it compromises thought. Under the slightest pressure, then, the Cartesian mindbody union reveals itself to be only a contingent whole whose parts maintain differential value for the subject. As I’ll show, Descartes’ discussion of rational love weaves a complex rationale for retaining or rejecting our connection to something that is important to, but not constitutive of, our being. Descartes’ conception of love (and affect more generally) derives from the body’s variegated impact on the minds’ capacities. The very first “movement of the soul” is its movement into the body, which occurs during some unspecified moment in our prenatal growth. This originary movement is accompanied by our first experience of joy; the soul takes joy in joining with the body in order to constitute a subject that is now “whole” by virtue of its capacity to embody thought. “I consider it probable,” Descartes writes to Chanut, “that the soul felt joy at the first moment of its union with the body.”176 As Lloyd implicitly qualifies, however, the soul doesn’t take joy in the

175

This kind of love, Descartes explains, “consists simply in the fact that when our soul perceives some present or absent good, which it judges to be fitting for itself, it joins itself to it willingly, that is to say that it considers the good in question as forming two parts of a single whole.” CSM III, 306. 176 CSM III, 307.

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body as such. Rather, it takes joy in the completion of the human subject that its embodiment accomplishes. The soul’s union with the body precipitates our first experience of the four basic passions: joy, love, sadness and hatred. All of these passions originate in bodily states. Through the passions, the soul renders judgment about how the body’s states affect it, expressing, in a more general sense, the extent to which it is passively subjected to the body’s vicissitudes. “The soul,” Descartes writes, “uniting itself willingly to new matter felt love for it; and later, if the food happened to be lacking, it felt sadness. And if its place was taken by some other matter unsuitable for as food for the body, it felt hatred.”177 The soul comes to know that its union with the body will not always be advantageous, and thus asserts its capacity to judge the value of the body’s contribution to the Cartesian human being. Ultimately, then, the soul’s initial joy in its unity with the body is quickly undercut by its experience of the body’s contingencies. But despite the body’s now-degraded status, the joy we felt in relation to our originary embodiment becomes the foundation for how we experience love for the rest of our lives. In this sense, the mind-body union grounds the very structure of rational love: it affirms that we feel love for something with which we form a complete whole. Descartes’ doctrine of rational love, like his dualism, prescribes conditions under which it is advisable or detrimental to

177

CSM III, 308.

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remain joined with the beloved. What aspects of our connection with others and other things are contingent and which are necessary? The first form of Descartes’ rational love pertains to things that should be regarded as “lesser than ourselves,” and in this case, Descartes authorizes us to sacrifice this beloved for our own good. Citing birds, flowers and buildings as examples of “lesser beloveds,” Descartes explains that “the highest perfection which this love can reach cannot make us put our life at risk for the preservation of such things.”178 The unity that we rationally form with these things recognizes the differential value of its parts, figuring the lesser part as expendable. Like the mind-body union, this form of rational love is hierarchical and contingent. This crypto-dualism also structures our most intimate relationships – that is, it operates within forms of love whose hierarchical relations are not immediately apparent. Lloyd highlights a particularly grotesque deployment of this logic in which Descartes tries to comfort his friend Alphonse Pollot after the death of his brother.179 By so doing, Descartes refers to one of Pollot’s own personal losses – the loss of his hand fifteen years earlier in the siege of Boise-le-Duc.180 He tells Pollot, “the loss of brother, it seems to me, is not unlike the loss of a hand,” Descartes explains, “you have already suffered the former without, and as far as I can see being overwhelmed,

178

CSM III, 311. Lloyd, 164-5. 180 Ariew, Roger; Des Chene, Dennis; Jesseph, Douglas M.; Schmaltz, Tad M.; Verbeek, Theo. The Historical Dictionary of Descartes and Cartesian Philosophy. Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2003, 209. 179

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so why should the formed affect you so much more?”181 The analogy between personal loss and bodily injury is striking. Just as Pollot is still constitutively himself without his hand, so he should be constitutively untransformed by the loss of his brother. Just as, in the Meditations, Descartes proves that even our most intimate sensory experience may be deceitful, so here he tries to convince Pollot that our most intimate relationships may ultimately prove expendable. The result, Lloyd points out, is tremendously uncompassionate and disturbing. If, indeed, the “parts” whose unions constitute our very being are, in fact, independent and separable, then how can we consider personal, social or familial unions to be genuinely lasting in Descartes’ thought? Friendship evinces a much different structure of valuation. When two human beings love each other,” Descartes writes, “charity requires that each of the two should value his friend above himself; and so their friendship is not perfect until each is ready to say in favor of the other, ‘it is me who did it, I am here, turn your sword against me.’”182 Departing from Aristotle’s conception of friendship as a shared love of truth, Descartes frames the perfect friendship as a shared commitment to the other’s survival over oneself, that is, as a mutual commitment to bodily sacrifice. On this logic, the integrity of the whole friendship supersedes the value of its constitutive embodied parts. This view reflects Montaigne’s notion that a perfect friendship should be understood as “one soul with two bodies” – as a single soul that remains intact even

181 182

CSM III, 168. CSM III, 311. 109

when one of its bodies is no longer present. Montaigne’s perfect friends are so thoroughly unified that they cannot “give or lend” anything to each other; utterly lacking in individuation, Montaigne’s friends always-already share everything in common.183 Jacques Derrida examines the tense relation between early modern friendship and the law.184 Recall that in Descartes’ brief formulation, the “perfect friend” reserves the right to reverse or disregard the mandates of justice by accepting a punishment that was not intended for him. In this sense, Derrida maintains, early modern friendship tends to declare itself above or outside the law, positing itself as both secretive and apolitical. Derrida culls this position from Montaigne, who asserts that friendship is constitutively opposed to political justice. The friends’ inability to “give or lend,” on Montaigne’s read, indicates that their access to one another is not contractually negotiated or mediated. It simply is a condition of unmediated sharing. In Derrida’s view, friendship is not only apolitical – it is also futural. Friendship always unfolds as a promise or a pledge whose fulfillment has yet to come despite how intensely we might desire it. “… how could I be your friend and declare my friendship for you,” Derrida asks, “if friendship did not remain something yet to happen, to be desired, to be promised?”185 Descartes’ perfect friendship ratchets the

183

Michel de Montaigne. Trans. Charles Cotton. “Of Friendship,” Project Gutenberg’s The Essays of Montaigne. 2006. http://gutenberg.readingroo.ms/3/5/8/3586/3586.txt. Accessed 19 July 2011. 184 Jacques Derrida. “The Politics of Friendship.” The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 85, No. 11. (November 1988): 632-644. 185 Ibid., 635. 110

intensity of such a deferral insofar as its perfection is articulated by the friends’ willingness to die for another. Cartesian friendship, thus, appears to destroy itself the moment that it becomes perfect. Although Cartesian friendship is not structured in as clearly a hierarchical way as, say, his first rational love, it nonetheless forms a tenuous whole whose perfection is immanent to its destruction. Implicitly rejecting this famous deconstructive reading, Reiss wagers a different interpretation on the relation of friendship to the cogito in Descartes’ thought. Citing Descartes’ own allusion to the Thirty Years’ War in Part Two of the Discourse on Methods (1637), Reiss posits Descartes’ individuation of the subject through the cogito as a response to a dearth of tools for “analysis of and consequent action” in a world that appeared to be in a “state of unsolvable state of disarray.”186 As such, Reiss argues that the cogito (and all of the closure and self-sufficiency it is supposed to entail) is often wrongly treated as an end unto itself, when in actuality it is a means for the foundation of an intellectual community based on “a complete knowledge of the sciences, which is the ultimate form of wisdom.”187 The Cartesian subject’s groundedness in thought (whose stability Meditation Three’s proof of God guarantees) is supposed to allow her to participate in this community.188

186

Reiss, 475. Reiss implies that in the Leviathan, Hobbes misreads the cogito as a “lone, selfcentered thinking essence,” assuming that the Carteisan subject’s self-sufficiency would yield “ubiquitous conflict” without a covenant model of government grounded upon the sovereign. (475) 188 Although Descartes doesn’t theorize how knowledge is shared and transmitted as explicitly as Spinoza does in the Ethics, Reiss locates evidence for Descartes’ interest in community in his corpus itself. 187

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The proof that God exists allows the Cartesian subject to affiliate herself with an absolute will while at the same time situating the cogito in the worldly practice of right reason. In Reiss’ words, “truth was the identified ground and end not only of Method, but also of the subject, as well as of reason, morality and a communal ethics – what we more usually chose to call politics.”189 The cogito and the stable rational practices it entails then become a means for social and intellectual engagement, as well as political life. Just as good reason is equal in all men, so is the capacity to form generous friendship based in rational love. In Passions of the Soul, Descartes writes, “…there is no person so imperfect that we could not have for him a perfect friendship, given that we believe ourselves loved by him and that we have a truly noble and generous soul.”190 Insofar as generosity is defined as self-knowledge, cultivating the moral, ethical and rational consequences of the cogito is supposed to facilitate a way of joining with others in friendship so as to guide them to greater perfection. The role of the friend in framing the Compendium refracts the text in multiple directions: towards dualism, towards the cogito, towards the social and, on Reiss’ read, towards the political. The complex allusions to dualism that constitute this textual frame mirror the crypto-dualist positions embedded within the Compendium itself. But this crypto-dualism, as I’ll explain in the next section, doesn’t emerge He writes, “What, more importantly, could we then make of his determined collection of ‘Replies’ and ‘Objections’ to the Meditations? Of earlier efforts to do the same for the Discourse and its Essays? …Their mere existence belies notions of selfsufficiency.” (473) On Reiss’ read, the stability of the cogito empowers the Cartesian subject to participate in rational discourse and worldly life. 189 Reiss, 484. 190 CSM I, 357. 112

through the category of epistemological certainty in the manner of the cogito, but instead through the category of sensory pleasure. Pleasure, in the Compendium articulates itself through an extremely tenuous but highly productive opposition: the relation between the senses and the soul.

2.4 Sonic Materiality and Mathematical Pleasures: The Crypto-Dualism of Descartes’ Compendium Nearly all examinations of the Compendium remark on its first sentence: “The basis of music is sound; its aim is to please and to arouse various emotions in us.”191 As Alex Rehding and Suzannah Clark put it, “with only slight exaggeration one could claim that [Descartes’] first four words sum up the impact of the scientific revolution on music – the change from music as a divine force to music as a material phenomenon.”192 When musical sound loses its connection to cosmological principles, it loses the necessary connection to the human subject that this cosmological status once guaranteed. When Descartes replaces secret affinities and substantial forms with motion and quantity, Augst argues, “…it is not only the object, the phenomenon observed which comes under scrutiny, but also the possibility of the observer to perceive the object, and in 1618, unwilling to use the complex apparatus of Scholastic physics, Descartes could only rely on sense perception, his one real link between the

191

Compendium, 13. Clark, Suzanna and Rehding, Alexander., Ed. Music Theory and Natural Order from the Renaissance to the Early Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, 6. 192

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observer and the object.”193 In order to develop a mathematical and empirical approach to sound as an object of the senses, he also must somehow account for how the senses function such that they can access these sounding objects. The mathematical study of sound should entail, in other words, a correspondingly mathematical study of the ear’s sensory capacities. But this is not exactly how Descartes’ inquiry unfolds over the course of the Compendium’s thirty-odd pages. Descartes’ understanding of musical pleasure creates ambiguity regarding the ear’s capacities at an epistemological juncture at which the senses, and not numerical correspondences, become the subject’s primary link to the world. Descartes’ examination of what the senses are capable of perceiving articulates itself through the problem of what pleases the senses, not the conditions under which they are most reliable. Cartesian sensory pleasure rests in how difficult it is for us achieve clear perception of variously complex objects. After confirming that “all senses are capable of experiencing pleasure,” Descartes goes on to elaborate that pleasure consists in a certain relation between the sensed object and our sensory capacities. “For this pleasure,” he writes, “a proportional relation of some kind between the object and the sense itself must be present.”194 Rather than engage directly with these proportions, Descartes first, perhaps misleadingly, examines proportions so unpleasurable that they actually damage the ears. “The noise of guns and thunder is

193 194

Augst, 122. Compendium, 11. 114

not fit for music,” Descartes writes, “because it injures the ears.”195 Though this overstated example isn’t helpful in explicating the sense’s capacities, Descartes continues, refining the characteristics of sense objects that maximize the senses’ capacities to perceive things distinctly. Descartes unfolds these parameters in four steps of increasing specificity, drawing on visual examples, not aural ones. After first discounting injurious sense experiences, Descartes uses the astrolabe to compare complex regular patterns to irregular patterns. We can perceive the former more easily – all the more so when “the difference between the parts are smaller.” Descartes then defines “difference” though proportionality, asserting that parts of an object “will be less different when there is a greater proportion between them,” like 2:1 or 3:2 as opposed to 7:8. Finally, Descartes specifies that these proportions ought to be arithmetic, which will produce equal parts, and not geometric, whose parts are unequal. Below, I have reproduced both the arithmetic and geometric figures from modern and period translations of the text.196

195

Compendium, 11-12. The Compendium was first published in 1650, and the first English translation of the Compendium appeared in London in 1653. The cover of the period translation reads: “London, Printed by Thomas Harper, for Humphrey Moseley; and are to bee sold at his Shop at the Signe of the Princes Armes in S. Pauls Church-Yard and by Thomas Heath in Coven Gardent, 1653.” 196

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Fig. 2 ! Arithmetic Proportions.

Fig. 3 ! Geometric proportions.

By way of parsing these examples, Descartes writes, “the proportion obtained between [arithmetic proportions] is easier to perceive visually than [the] geometric proportions.”197 Descartes allows vision to function as a proxy for hearing, making what Moreno suggests is a lateral move between sense modalities. 198 That is, we should be able to hear the difference between these proportions’ parts as easily as we can see them – what we can see is taken as evidence as what we can hear when it comes to perceiving proportionality. While seeing and hearing evince equal abilities in this respects, vision easily gain the cognitive upper hand by virtue of its ability to

197

Compendium, 12 (my italics). The period translation tells us “the proportion of these [arithmetic] lines is more easily distinguished by the eyes that these [geometric lines].” (again, my italics) 198 Moreno, 67. 116

represent hearing. Vision’s subsumption of hearing, in the Compendium, presages what will later become a fully visual conception of thought in the Meditations. After discussing the attributes that best accommodate our senses to their objects Descartes devotes his last Preliminary remark, finally, to pleasure. There, he writes, Among the sense objects most agreeable to the soul is neither that which is perceived most easily not that which is perceived with the greatest difficulty; it is that which does not quite gratify the natural desire by which the senses are carried to object, yet not so complicated that it tires the senses.199 A number of important aspects of Descartes’ view of sensory pleasure come into play here. First, while pleasure is, in a sense, contingent on what the senses are able to perceive without sustaining, say, bodily injury, it really only registers in the immaterial domain of the soul. If pleasure is an affair of the soul, then it can’t explain how or what the ears perceive “with ease” or “with difficulty.” While Erlmann can only point out that Descartes seems conflicted about what “is easy for the ear to perceive,” I locate this problem with the locus of sensation more generally. Indeed, Descartes takes on two seemingly opposed explanatory projects here: he is trying to demonstrate that senses are materially yoked to sense objects while at the same time explain how the immaterial soul (or mind) takes pleasure in the senses’ activities. If the soul is, in fact, the locus of musical pleasure, then Descartes’ formulation of musical pleasure begins to look remarkably like the account of sensation that he 199

Compendium, 13. 117

develops in the Meditations. And if this is the case, Descartes seems to understand sensation as a form of thought as early as the Compendium – before, importantly, he subjects the senses to the method of doubt that drives Meditation One. However, because Descartes is clearly concerned with what falls within and beyond the ear’s normative capacities in the Compendium, he is also thoroughly engaged with the mechanism and materiality of hearing. In this sense, then, Descartes’ discussion of pleasure begins to reveal a subtle dualism at work within the Compendium. Although Descartes’ position on the relation of sound to knowledge changes radically between the Compendium and the Meditations, Descartes maintains his position on what constitutes sensory pleasure well beyond the scope of the earlier text. In correspondence with Mersenne twelve years after the Compendium’s completion, Descartes responds to queries about the distinction between pleasantness and beauty by citing the Compendium’s Preliminary Seven nearly verbatim. “I cannot give any better explanation,” Descartes tells Mersenne, “than the one I gave long ago in my treatise on music.”200 Descartes’ 1630 account of what is easy for the senses to perceive is no more specific than the account he offers in the Compendium. Leaving music behind in this later explication of beauty, Descartes turns to a visual example, referring to the varying complexity of patterns in ornamental gardens. “The one that pleases the most people can be called the most beautiful without qualification,” Descartes writes, “but which this is cannot be determined.”201 Thomas Christensen

200 201

CSM III, 19. CSM III, 20. 118

helpfully focuses attention on another letter to Mersenne that ratchets the impossibility of intersubjective agreement about beauty in musical sound. “Asking someone to explain their preferences for an interval,” Christensen paraphrases, “is like asking someone ‘why fruit is not more agreeable to the palate than fish.”’202 The problem, here, is not that the senses deceive the subject about whether fruit or fish is agreeable or not, it that each individual is disposed toward different judgments about these matters of agreeability. As such, Christensen summarizes, “music was relegated to the domain of taste; Descartes wanted to concentrate on those sciences which would be treated with mathematical certainty.”203 If, as Reiss asserts, the cogito forms the foundation for social and political life by guaranteeing certainty in the sciences, then music’s failure to articulate stable and universal knowledge severs it from both rational sociality and politics.204 But this does not mean, of course, that Descartes’ understanding of how music acts upon the body does not inform his later views on what bodies can do. While the soul discerns how sound challenges the senses, the body simply reacts automatically to sound’s vibrational touch. In Descartes’ hands, sound’s material force becomes radically un-anthropocentric, animating human beings in much the same way as it

202

Christensen, 83. Ibid., 83. 204 Indeed, at the beginning of this chapter, I argued that music and dualism, as such, are not opposed within Descartes’ musical thought. Though this is most certainly the case, music is, ultimately, opposed to the epistemological certainty that the cogito entails. 203

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animates animals and non-living things, like stones and organ pipes. Because “sound strikes all bodies on all sides,” movement becomes nothing more and nothing less than a physiological compulsion. 205 “We accompany each beat of the music by a corresponding motion of our body,” Descartes writes, adding “we are quite naturally compelled to do this.”206 Precisely because our responses to rhythmic impetus are automated, Descartes explains, animals can be taught to dance just as easily as human beings; dance thus becomes less an expressive form than a mechanical activation of the body.207 Musical memory and its attendant affects are similarly automated. “What makes some people want to dance may make others want to cry,” Descartes writes, “this is because it evokes ideas in our memory…if someone had never heard a galliard without some affliction befalling him, he would certainly grow sad when he heard it again.”208 Memory, bodily and affect are here described as involuntary responses to the simple presence of sound’s mechanical force. But when Descartes considers sounds’ effect on the ear, he renders its mathematical features with greater detail and nuance – though the workings of the ear are mechanical, they are not automated in the manner of the body. Descartes hierarchicizes musical intervals based on the extent to which they challenge the ear’s

205

Compendium, 14-15. Compendium, 14. 207 Rehding and Clark assert that Descartes’ introductory discussion of the sound of drums made of sheep and wolf skin appeals to a “transcendental hierarchy that all things obey.” (1) Descartes’ remark about dancing animals liquidates this hierarchy, but does affirm that bodily responses to music are inevitable and natural consequences of sound’s vibrational materiality. 208 Compendium, 20. 206

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capacities. The octave and unison are easiest for the ear to perceive, which disqualifies from the production of musical pleasure. The fifth, on the other hand, is maximally pleasing because its tones are “more at variance.” The 2:3 ratio they render sonorous is both arithmetic and distinct. When discussing the fifth, Descartes refers back to Preliminary Seven, reminding us that variety is essential for the production of musical pleasure. But “variety” doesn’t describe a feature of the sound itself so much as the effort the ear exerts in order to grasp some sounds over others. The difference between the tones that comprise the fifth “keep the ear busier” than those of the octave or unison. The ear’s degree of activity, under this Cartesian logic, will be called musical pleasure.209 An uneasy dualism shimmers beneath the surface of music’s differential effects on the body and soul, or mind. The body’s reactions to sound (and music) are automated, while pleasure subsists within the soul. The ear sits uncomfortably between the two, straddling the material and the immaterial domains of the human being. This liminal position will take on special import in the Meditations under the rubric of epistemological certainty, not pleasure. But does this mean, given Descartes’ apparent disinterest in the ear’s reliability, that the Compendium is utterly unconcerned with the question of certainty? Through my engagement with Descartes’ early work on the Rules for the Direction of the Mind, I’ll explain that this is not exactly the case. 209

The ear can parse even greater degrees of complexity in the absence of pitch. “In the case of the military drum,” he writes, “the meter can be composed not only of two or three units, but perhaps even of five, seven or more.” When interval and pitch are bracketed, the ear becomes capable of cognizing increased metric complexity. (Compendium 15) 121

2.5 Rules for the Direction of the Ear: Epistemological Certainty and the Deductive Cartesian Listener Like the Compendium, Descartes’ Rules for the Direction of the Mind were not published until after death in 1650. Once thought to have been composed in their entirety in 1628, Gaukroger (and Augst, before him) asserts that there is now good reason to believe that large portions of the Rules were composed between 1619 and 1620 following the flurry of decisive events surrounding Descartes’ dreams of 10 November 1619.210 Descartes wagers a first attempts at his method for investigating truth, which he explains in Rule Four: By a method I mean reliable rules which are easy to apply and such that if one follows them exactly, one will never take what is false to be true and fruitlessly expend one’s mental efforts, but will gradually and constantly increase one’s knowledge till one arrives at a true understanding of everything within one’s capacity.211 Descartes posits deduction and intuition as cognitive pillars of this method, claiming that the disciplines that tend to be grouped under the rubric of mathematics (astronomy, music, optics and mechanics) should be unified under these two methodological strategies. Intuition and deduction, the Descartes of the Rules asserts,

210

Gaukroger, 111. Between 1619-1620, Descartes composed Rules 1-4, 5-11 and part of Rule 7. The rest of the Rules, according to Gaukroger, were completed between 1626-1628. 211 CSM I, 16. 122

are the only intellectual operations through which “we can arrive at knowledge of things with no fear of being mistaken.”212 In this first iteration of the Rules, Edwin Curley explains, “Descartes lays out a foundation for reducing all of the separates sciences to one science, modeled on mathematics, which would start with assumptions known by intuition and derive the rest of knowledge from those initial assumptions by deduction.”213 Although Descartes replaces these intuited premises with the cogito without ever publishing his conclusions in the Rules, this text nonetheless tells us much about Descartes’ early conception of epistemological certainty. So, how does the Compendium come into play here? I argue that Descartes’ prescriptions for how we hear melody align remarkably well with the principles for the production of certain knowledge that he outlines in the Rules. The Rules frames those principles as mental operations, while in the Compendium, they are material. Although Gaukroger points out, the Compendium’s prioritization of clarity in perception presages the category of clarity and distinctness that Descartes develops in the Rules, that clarity applies more readily to melody that it does to interval, in which case the question of pleasure seems to be more important.214

212

CSM I, 13. Edwin Curley. “The Cogito and the Foundations of Knowledge.” In The Blackwell Guide to Descartes’ Meditations. Ed. Stephen Gaukroger. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2006, 32. 214 Erlmann takes a related, but circumlocutious etymological route through the relation of sound to epistemological certainty in Descartes’ thought. He reminds us that the term inconcussum, which Descartes uses to connote indubitability, “…is surrounded by a semantic field carrying, apart from the idea of violent motion, specifically sonic and cognitive connotations.” (31) 213

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Descartes outlines two kinds of listening in the Compendium. In the first, the Cartesian listener tracks a melody’s unfolding in real time, parsing the relation of each new sound to the one that precedes it. The second is significantly more synthetic – this Cartesian listener is able to grasp the underlying structure of the melody without rehearsing how musical events unfold in sequence. When the entire melody consists of 8 or 16 or 32 or 64 units, etc., i.e. all divisions result from a 1:2 proportion. For then we hear the first two units as one, then we add a third unit to the first two, so that the proportion is 1:3; on hearing unit 4, we connect it with the third, so that we apprehend then together; then we connect the first two with the last two, so that we grasp those four as unit; and so our imagination proceeds to the end, the whole melody is finally understood as the sum of many equal parts.215 Descartes wants his listener to affirm, first, that she understands the ratios that inform each successive unit of musical material. He wants her, in other words, to affirm that she understands how each part of the melody is related to temporally adjacent parts.

On Erlmann’s read, the cogito’s supposed silence is fraudulent. Not only is Descartes conception of indubitability always-already sonorous, he argues, it also draws our attention to Descartes’ engagement with anti-Aristotelian debates about sound transmission. While I agree that sound is implicated in the formation of certain knowledge for Descartes, I locate this relationship in the relation between Descartes’ formulation of formal listening in the Compendium and the processes of deduction and intuition he describes in the Rules. 215 Compendium, 14.

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But he also wants her to grasp the melody as a complete, ordered entity. By rehearsing the relation between successive parts, Descartes seems to imply, his listener can grasp the arithmetic relationships that underlie the complete melody. The first mode of listening prioritizes temporal succession, while the second grasps the melody’s structure as a simultaneity. While intuition, derived from the Latin intuire (“to look upon or gaze at”) describes the single, unified mental action by which we grasp self-evident truths in their entirety, deduction describes our ability to infer one thing from another in order to reach truthful and certain conclusions in a “continuous and wholly interrupted sweep of thought.”216 The faster we are able to move through deductive procedures, the more deduction becomes like intuition, and thus, it becomes more reliable.217 In Rule Seven, Descartes describes how deductive processes work. This entails first “[coming] to know the relation between magnitudes A and B, and then between B and C, and then between C and D, and then finally, between D and E.”218 After having studied these relationships sequentially, we should be able grasp the relationship between A and E in a single mental action. In light of Rules Seven’s explication, the mode of listening Descartes recommends in the Compendium appears is patently deductive. Combining Rule Seven’s treatment of magnitudes with the Compendium’s melody might go something like this: Units A

216

CSM, I 25. Gaukroger, 118. 218 CSM I, 25. 217

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and B enjoy a 1:2 relationship. Upon hearing unit C, we understand A, B and C to be in a 1:3 relationship. When we hear unit D, we place it in a 1:2 relationship with C, and, finally, we perceive the melody as divisible into two symmetrical parts. After having enumerated the melody’s unfolding “bit-by-bit,” we might, as Descartes’ recommends in Rule Seven, work to bind each part to one another so closely that we “seem to have to whole thing in front of [us] at the same time.”219 Reading between these two texts endows listening with tremendous power and nuance. That is, we can accommodate our listening to both the successive and simultaneous articulation of arithmetic relationships. And so, on this reading, the Compendium’s listener becomes the blueprint for the deductive thinker of the Rules. It would seem, then, that Descartes’ formulae for epistemological certainty in the Rules lie inchoate within the aural experience with which the Compendium is concerned. And yet, Moreno points out a crucial difference. While in the Compendium, listenerly deduction is located at the difficult threshold between the ear and the soul, the Rules’ deduction occurs exclusively within the mind. Noting the transformation of aural deduction into intellectual deduction prepares us for the subsumption of sense perception within thought accomplished in the Meditations. 2.6 The Cogito and the Production of the “Mind’s Eye:” Thought and Visuality Between the Meditations and the Optics

219

CSM I, 25. 126

In the span of time that separates the Compendium and the Rules from the Meditations, Descartes’ position on sound changes radically. In Meditation Six, Descartes’ counts sound among the corporeal qualities he understands least clearly. “What of the other aspects of corporeal things,” Descartes asks, “which are less clearly understood, such as light, sound or pain?”220 Once exemplary, sound has now become a problem for certain knowledge. This section examines how visual representation, and not sonic experience, comes to exemplify thought in the Meditations and the earlier Optics. How, does sonic materiality fit into Descartes’ now-robust formulation of dualism? In a late letter to Mersenne, Descartes affirms that at the end of his career, were he not so old, he would like to return to a theory of music. While Descartes may have failed to enfold sound into his mature epistemology, he indicates that readdressing the sonic was, indeed, both an open and urgent question in his philosophy more broadly. As John Carriero points out, something very important is typically left out of standard interpretations of Meditation One. Nearly one-third of the text – situated between the dreaming doubt and the introduction of the evil deceiver – develops an elaborate analogy between dream images and paintings.221 For Carriero, Descartes’ anti-skeptical arguments cohere with his search for a mathematical foundation for 220

CSM II, 55. John Carriero. “Painting and Dreaming in the First Meditation.” Norms and Modes of Thinking in Descartes, Acta Philosophica Fennica, 64 (1999), pp. 13-46 Jacques Derrida’s treatment of the Meditations in Writing and Difference (1978) is a notable exception to Carriero’s claim that painting analogy is left unanalyzed in most treatments of Meditation One. 221

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knowledge through the painting analogy; thus, the extent to which we can integrate the analogy into a reading of the method of doubt becomes a “critical measure of how well we have understood the Meditations.”222 I am interested in the painting analogy because it throws Descartes’ engagements with aurality and visuality into stark relief while demonstrating the role that artistic representation plays in Descartes’ ascription of sense experience to the mind. As is well known, Meditation One shepherds the reader (henceforth “the meditator”) through a series of increasingly more devastating doubts that first undermine the senses’ ability to represent the world accurately, culminating in the evil deceiver’s proposal that all of our thoughts are fallacious. As Marleen Rozemond helpfully explicates, the Descartes of the Meditations is in the business of re-drawing the distinction between mental and bodily activity in order to emplace sense perception in the mind, not within the mind-body composite as the typical Aristotelian constriction would have it.223 At the opening of Meditation One, Descartes affirms that “whatever I have now accepted as most true I have acquired either from the senses or through the senses.”224 Rozemond contextualizes this position by summarizing a later elaboration in the Principles: “Descartes regards the attribution of sensible qualities – flavors, smells, colors, and the like – to bodies as an error originating in our 222

Carriero, 13. Marleen Rozemond. “The Nature of the Mind.” In The Blackwell Companion to Descartes’ Meditations. Ed. Stephen Gaukroger. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006. 224 CSM II, 17. 223

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childhood. During this period we develop the view that the physical world resembles our sensations, and that the sense that it has the kinds of qualities it appears to have in sense perception.”225 Becoming a mature thinker (and, according to Reiss, a mature agent in the political world) requires separating our cognitive capacities from the world of material things. This summary contests Scholastic Aristotelian views of sense perception which maintain, on the one hand, that perception occurs in the “ensouled body” and, on the other, that the objects that we sense transmit likenessness of themselves to us, thus temporarily informing us with their qualities. As Carriero explains, [in an Aristotelian account of knowledge], in order for one thing to know another, the first thing must have something common with the second. This commonality is understood as a formal identity: the knower assumes a form of the thing that is known. In the case of human natural knowledge this assimilation takes place through the cooperation of our lower sensory faculties and higher intellectual faculties.226 Descartes, as I’ll explicate through my discussion of Meditation One and the Optics, rejects this construction, emplacing sense perception within the mind while recasting 225

Marleen Rozemond. “The First Meditation and the Senses.” British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 1996. pp. 21-52. 226 Carriero, 18.

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the senses as mechanical transmitters of impulses from objects from the outer world. The progressive withdrawal from the senses precipitated by the method of doubt allows Descartes to rethink perception’s place in a newly configured separation between the mental and material. And so, on the way to the painting analogy, I’ll narrate the sense-based beliefs that Descartes would have encouraged us to discard by the time we consider painting. Descartes first asks the meditator to acknowledge that the senses often fail to represent size and magnitude accurately with respect to things that “are far away or very small.”227 But, if distance or size is the problem, Descartes speculates, immediate and proximal experiences should be more reliable. “How,” Descartes asks, “could it be denied that these hands, and this whole body are mine?”228 Descartes leverages two arguments against this proposal, both of which sever the contents of the mind from worldly actuality. The mad, Descartes proposes, are constantly deceived about the state of their own bodies, maintaining, among other extravagances, that “they are pumpkins or made of glass.” After reprimanding himself for using an example that’s (allegedly) not applicable to him, Descartes proffers an equivalent experience of deception in dreams.229 When we dream, Descartes explains, we experience many 227

CSM II, 12. CSM II, 13. 229 In Jacques Derrida’s strident critique of Foucault’s reading of the madness doubt, he asserts that the dreams actually instigate a more devastating form of doubt than madness. Citing Martial Gueroult, Derrida points out that dreamer’s inability to tell whether she is awake or asleep calls the “absolute totality of ideas of sensory origin” into question, while madmen are simply mistaken about their own bodily states (51). 228

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bodily states that have no correlate in reality; that is, we have sense experiences whose origin we cannot verify – do these images come, in some way, from the outside world, or are dream images simply produced within the mind itself? Descartes puts pressure on the nature of dream images through the painting analogy. He thus speculates, The images I have in sleep are like the paintings which must have been fashioned in the likenesses of things that are real, and hence that at least these general kinds of things – eyes, head, hands and the body as a whole – as things that are not imaginary but are real and exists.230 The implication here is that dream images recapitulate information that we’ve gathered through the senses even if the objects thereby represented are not immediately present. Lurking behind this construal of dreams and painting is a key Artistotelian tenet: nothing can exist in the mind without first having existed in the senses. No matter how extravagant their images, painters supposedly draw on sense experience for their composition. “Even when painters try to create sirens and satyrs This argument upends Foucault’s claim that Descartes’ failure to resolve the doubts inculcated by madness (over, say, those produced by errors in scale), grants madness special treatment in what Foucault calls Descartes’ “economy of doubt” (46). Rather, Derrida argues that madness arguments posits sanity as the contract (“I am here writing, and you understand me. I am not mad, nor are you, and we are all sane”) by which Descartes encourages his readers to indulge in the maddest project imaginable: the rejection of all prior knowledge. Jacques Derrida. Trans. Alan Bass. Writing and Difference. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. 230 CSM II, 13. 131

with the most extraordinary bodies,” Descartes clarifies, “they cannot give them natures which are new in all respects; they simply jumble up the limbs of different animals.”231 The painting analogy, thus, strategically (and temporarily) imputes a modicum of truth to dream images by highlighting their supposed origin in sense experience. Descartes temporarily ratifies this Artistotelian claim only in order to overturn it with the help of the famous evil deceiver. But before doing so, Descartes pushes painting’s basis in the worldly reality still further, holding fast to the notion that dream images are derived from the senses. He continues, Or if perhaps they manage to think up something so new that nothing remotely similar has been seem before – something which is completely fictitious and unreal – at least the colors used in the composition must be real. By similar reasoning, although these general kinds of things – eyes, head, hands and so on – could be imaginary, it must at least be admitted that certain other and even simpler and more universal things are real. These are as it were real colors from which we form all the images of things, whether true or false which occur in our thoughts. Carriero locates an important shift of register in the passage. That is, the meditator ceases reflecting on the relation between mental images and an external world and 231

CSM II, 13. 132

instead reflects on the medium of thought itself. Painting – particular its deployment of color – precipitates this crucial shift. The limits of painterly representation, Carriero explains, “are set by features internal to the medium of representation; they do not depend on the painter’s interaction with things outside of the medium.”232 Put a little more evocatively, “The painter is not limited to depicting only the sorts of things that have been experienced; he or she is limited only by what can be done with color.”233 Thought, Descartes implies in the final sentence quoted above, must be structured similarly. That is, thought must take place through a medium that is entirely internal to itself – that is, in a medium that is, that in no way depends on what has been or can be learned through the senses. Transposing the painting analogy into the register of thought is a matter of determining “what occupies a place in human thought comparable to that of colors in painting.”234 These media, Descartes speculates might include “corporeal nature in general, and its extension, the shape of extended things, the quantity, or size and number of these things; the place in which they exist and the time in which they endure.”235 Simple and irreducible, these items form the condition of possibility for our cognition of what Carriero calls a corporeal order.236 At this point in the method of doubt, Descartes has guided the meditator to (perhaps unwittingly) towards aspects of experience that subsist within thought alone – thus she has almost fully withdrawn 232

Carriero, 28. Ibid., 28. 234 Ibid., 28. 235 CSM II, 14. 236 Ibid., 28. 233

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from the senses. The painting analogy, Carriero maintains, trains the meditator to distinguish between what is internal and external to thought, emplacing the production of mental images (regardless of their relation to worldly actuality) squarely within the mind. Thus, once the evil deceiver convinces us that “body, shape, movement and place are all chimeras,” we have already become aware that those mental contents never depended on our experience of the world in the first place. It is within the medium of thought, then, that we find the cogito. The cogito argument affirms that even though the meditator may be deceived about the content of her own thoughts, the deceiver cannot deny her existence as the thinker of those thoughts. Descartes reasons, Does it now follow that, I, too do not exist? No: if I convinced myself of something, then I certainly existed. But there is a deceiver of extreme power and cunning who is deliberately and constantly deceiving me. In this case, I too, undoubtedly exist, if he is deceiving me; and let him deceive me as much as he can, he will never bring it about that I am nothing as long as I think that I am something.237 If, as Edwin Curley suggests, all of the methods of doubt-production that precede the evil deceiver propose convincing sources of error, the evil deceiver doubt is an exception. Why? The hypothesis, Curley continues, that the evil deceiver casts doubt 237

CSM II, 17. 134

on my existence “entails my existence as the very proposition that it is intended to cast doubt on.”238 In order for the evil deceiver doubt to be intelligible, there has to be something or someone there to do the doubting in the first place.239 Indulging in the hypothesis that “I do not exist” constitutes a form of thinking and, thus, insofar as the meditator doubts her existence, she implicitly affirms her intractable existence as a thinker. By training the meditator to attend to the medium of mental representation, the painting analogy prepares her to apprehend the irreducible “I think” that subsists within the evil deceiver doubt. The painting analogy enforces a powerful separation between mental images and worldly actuality, grounding thought in a self-sufficient inner visuality. In the Optics, Descartes uses a slightly different style of “inner visuality” to model the mental bases for sensory representation. While painting draws us into the medium of mental representation in the Meditation, engraving, in the Optics, examines the very nature of representation. Taken together, the Meditations and the Optics explicate how we produce mental images while also calling into question how well those images represent external things. In the Optics, Descartes explicitly invokes an Aristotelian model for perception, stating plainly that his formulation of vision opposes the notion that “in order to have sensory perceptions the soul must contemplate certain images transmitted by the

238 239

Curley, 36. Curley, 36. 135

objects to our brain.”240 Indeed, what is under attack here is the notion that the images that we have of objects resemble those objects, and correspondingly, that objects guarantee this relation by “sending images of themselves to the inside of the brain.”241 While the Aristotelian model figures perception as a qualitatively unified process by which objects’ qualities are transmitted and received, Descartes’ understands perception to be composed of distinct parts. Rozemond calls attention to a passage from the Sixth Replies in which Descartes spells out exactly what aspect of sense perception occurs exclusively with the mind. Sense perception begins with the mechanical process in the body, while, The second grade contains everything that results immediately in the mind due to the fact that it is united to the corporeal organ so affected and such are the perceptions of pain, pleasure, thirst, hunger, colors, sound, flavor, smell, hear, cold and the like which result from the union and as it were, intermingling of mind and body, as I said in Meditation Six. The third grade comprises all those judgments about external objects which we have been used to

240 241

CSM I, 165. CSM I, 165. 136

making since our earliest childhood on the occasion of the motions of the corporeal organ.242 The second “grade” of perception represents sense stimuli through the specificity of the sense upon which they register. Vibration’s strike upon the tympanum is registered as sound, light’s contact with the eye is registered as an image and so on. Reflexively examining these images, the mind judges what actions should appropriately follow from this data. Consider, now, how Descartes famous haptic analogy for vision articulates the senses’ role in this tripartite scheme. No doubt you have had the experience of walking at night over rough ground without a light, and finding it necessary to use a stick in order to guide yourself. You may have then been able to notice that by means of this stick you could feel the various objects situated around you, and that you could even tell whether or not they were trees, stones or sand or water or grass or mud or any other such thing…and yet, in all those bodies the differences are

242

Sixth Replies Cited in Marleen Rozemond. “The Nature of the Mind.” In The Blackwell Guide to Descartes’ Meditations. Ed. Stephen Gaukroger. Malden: Blackwell, 2006, 54. 137

nothing other than the various ways of moving the stick or resisting its movements.243 The hand’s grasp upon with walking stick is like sound’s impact on the tympanum, or like light’s contact with the eye – all forms of “touch” are just mechanical stimuli that do not become images until constituted as such in the mind. Descartes’ use of touch as a blueprint for all sensation further emphasizes that the production of sensespecificity is also mental operation in the manner of the “second grade” of perception that he outlines in the Sixth Replies. Descartes’ engraving analogy unsettles but does not destroy the notion that mental images resemble objects in the world. Acknowledging the Aristotelian position, Descartes instructs, “even if, in order to depart as little as possible from accepted views, and we prefer to maintain that the objects that we perceive by our senses really send images of themselves to our brain, we must at least observe that in no case does an image have to resemble the object it represents in all respects, for otherwise there would be no distinction between image and object.”244 A clearer look at the process of representation, Descartes argues, will reveal a dangerous break in any the presumed relation between objects and their images. Engraving is paradigmatic in this sense because it explores how resemblance can be achieved through minimal representational means. Here is Descartes’ explanation of how engraving renders forth evocative images: 243 244

CSM I, 153. CSM I, 165. 138

You can see this in the case of engravings: consisting simply of a little ink placed here and there on a piece of paper, they represent to us forests, towns, people, battles and storms; and although they make us think of countless qualities in these objects, it is only in respect of shape that there is any real resemblance.245 Unlike the painting analogy, Descartes doesn’t explicitly frame engraving’s mode of representation as internal to thought. Rather, here he simply illustrates that it is in the very nature of images not to represent things accurately. The Aristotelian model for perception, it seems, misunderstands the process of image-making in the first place. While the Meditations’ paintings reveal the simple materials that constitute the mind’s representational capacities, the Optics’ engravings reveal how flexibly objects can be mentally represented while remaining to some degree recognizable.246 As Descartes explains, engravings’ images “excite our thought to conceive, as do signs and words which in no way resemble the things they signify.”247 Taken together the Meditations and the Optics precipitate a radical shift in matter’s relation to perception. Stripped of its capacity to transmit its qualities to perceivers, thus forming the 245

CSM I, 165. In his “Eye and Mind,” Maurice Merleau-Ponty describes Cartesian vision in an extremely schematic way that highlights the implications of Descartes’ mechanical view of visual perception. He explains, “in the world there is the thing itself, and outside this thing itself is that other thing which is really only reflected light rays and which happens to have an ordered correspondence with a the real thing. There are two individuals, then bound together externally through causality.” Maurice MerleauPonty. “Eye and Mind.” Trans. Michael B. Smith. In The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader. Ed. Galen A. Johnson. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993, 131. 247 CSM I, 165. 246

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perceiver in its likeness, Cartesian matter transmits only mechanical impulses toward the subject. Aristotle’s hylomorphic conception of perception cannot longer guarantee a qualitative continuity between perceiver and perceived. Each phase of Cartesian perception, as I’ll show, activates a mental faculty tailored specifically to understand its nuances. It is through these the faculties that Descartes re-addresses the mind-body union with an eye to asserting is ineluctable unity. 2.7 Mind and Body: Really Distinct and Substantially United

Painting and engraving are meant to orient us differently towards mental life. The analogy with painting compels us to reflect upon our capacity for mental representation. The engraving example asks us to entertain an extremely flexible relation between external things and mental images. In short, painting draws us inward, towards the mind’s constitution, and engraving directs us outward, toward the mechanical features of the things we perceive. Painting’s inward orientation is associated with the understanding, while our capacity to represent mechanical features of external things belongs to the imagination. Like many dimensions of Descartes thought, the relation between the understanding and the imagination is shot through with the same contradictions that inform the mind-body relation. The imagination pertains to the body; it “turns toward the body and looks at something in the body which conforms to an idea in the mind of something perceived

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by the senses.”248 The imagination furnishes us with our “mind’s eye” – that is, the capacity to generate images derived from the senses, to remember and to fabricate images of things we’ve never seen. The understanding, on the other hand, is not charged with the challenging task of generating imagines of external things, and is instead directed toward our inner experience of our own cognitive process. “When the mind understands,” Descartes writes, “it in some way turns inward and inspects one of the ideas that is within it.” The meditator’s reflection on the cogito presents a paradigmatic action of the understanding. The union of the imagination and the understanding becomes problematic when Descartes weighs the imagination against the cogito with respect to the constitution of the subject. As Descartes explains, “although this power of imagining is in me, it is not a necessary constituent of the essence of the mind. For if I lacked it, I should undoubtedly remain the same individual as I now am.”249 While imagination and sense perception do not have the same foundational relation to the subject as does the understanding, Descartes does recuperate their relation to the thinking subject by asserting that though he can conceive of himself without them, he cannot conceive of imagination or sense perception without thinking of them as part of his own intellectual substance. However, the cogito argument rests on the claim that the subject remains self-identical in all possible modes of thought, which includes willing,

248 249

CSM II, 51. CSM II, 51. 141

doubting, and sensing. Why, then, would the mental faculty that produces these modes of thought become suddenly inessential to the thinking subject? In a series of arguments much less infamous than the cogito argument, Descartes establishes that the body is, in fact, independent from the mind. Faculties like changing position and taking various shapes, Descartes asserts, and can be clearly and distinctly understood as part of a “corporeal and extended substance and not an intellectual one,” thus confirming that the actions of the body bear no likeness to mental processes. 250 Indeed, the Cartesian body retains an autonomy from the complete human subject analogous to the autonomy guaranteed the mind by the cogito. Like a clock or any other machine, Descartes writes, “I might consider the body of a man as a kind of machine equipped with and made up of bones, nerves, muscles, veins, blood and skin in such a way that, even if there were no mind in it, it would still perform all the same movements as it now does in those cases where movement is not under control of the will.”251 In this dark formulation, Descartes intimates that the body can exist without the mind just as other extended materials, like rocks, water and other matter can exist without ever having had a corresponding mind in the first place. Like the part/whole relationships that emerge through Descartes’ discussion of rational love, the human subject appears to be constituted of two parts that can indeed function absolutely independently. As such, then, they might

250 251

CSM II, 58. CSM II, 58. 142

be better understood as “wholes” unto themselves whose connection we can alternately affirm or deny based on variable epistemological circumstances and needs. As Daniel Garber explains, this ontological independence of mind and body presents Descartes with two serious challenges. First, Descartes has to affirm that the union of mind and body is intelligible to the subject thereby constituted. And second, he has to demonstrate and explain how the mind and body interact given the intelligibility of their union.252 As Garber explains, the relation between interaction and intelligibility is complexly nuanced. Experiencing our minds and body as either united or interactive is not the same thing as explaining how that union or interaction actually works given the ontological independence of both domains of the human subject. John Cottingham suggests that Descartes makes things more difficult for himself by insisting that the mind-body union is a substantial one.253 Despite the contingency of this union, Descartes still tries to maintain that, insofar as we are human beings, we are really constitutively united with our bodies. What, after all this detailed explication of their independence, can possibly inhere with the complete human being? Presaging, perhaps, the astonishing argument he makes about the soul’s prenatal embodied experience, Descartes asserts that he experiences the mind and body as 252

Daniel Garber. Descartes Embodied: Reading Cartesian Philosophy Through Cartesian Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 253 John Cottingham. “The Mind-Body Relation.” In The Blackwell Guide to Descartes’ Meditation. Ed. Stephen Gaukroger. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006, 184.

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ineluctably united when he feels that an agreeable or disagreeable sensation has the capacity to harm or benefit him as complete subject – as a “combination of body and mind.”254 As Rozemond recalls, for the Descartes of the Meditations, sensations are thoughts that belong to the mind “as it is united to the body.”255 Sensation, Descartes seems to argue, addresses the mind and body as a single, unified thing whose component parts can be affected immediately and simultaneously. This experience seems, then, not only to affirm the mind’s connection to the body, but also seems to reveal clues about how the mind subsists within the body’s materiality. The rich metaphor in and through which Descartes expresses this relation bears quoting at length. Nature also teaches, by these sensations of pain, hunger, thirst, and so on that I am not merely present in my body as a sailor is present in a ship, but that I am very closely joined, and as it were, intermingled with it so that I am the body form a unit. If this were not so, I, who am nothing but a thinking thing, would not feel pain when the body was hurt, but would perceive this danger purely by the intellect just as a sailor perceives by sight if anything in his ship is broken.256

254

CSM II, 56. Rozemond, 56. 256 CSM II, 56. 255

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At first glance, the metaphor seems to attenuate the mind’s sovereign power over the body, figuring the material body as somehow completely infused with mindedness. Indeed, we know that this simply cannot be the case. The mind, as Rozemond explains, is absolutely “incorporeal and indivisible, it cannot be literally mixed with the body.”257 So, what does this metaphor actually describe? Sensations, Rozemond details, are “modes of the mind insofar as it is united to the body.”258 And so, it is through sense experience that the mind feels itself insolubly linked to the body. While Spinoza offers a powerful argument for expanding our sensory capacities in the Ethics, Descartes attempts an explication of how to cultivate our awareness of the mind’s union with the body in his famous correspondence with Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia (1618-80).259 Elizabeth tirelessly presses Descartes on how exactly the 257

Rozemond, 56. Ibid., 56. 259 Descartes corresponded with Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia from 1642 until his death in 1650. He dedicated the Principles of Philosophy (1644) to her, and his last work The Passions of the Soul (1649) began “as a little treatise [on the passions] he wrote for her in 1646, which was itself a emerged from their correspondence about how human beings can control the passions in favor of a contemplative life. After her father Frederick was deposed the crown of Bohemia, Elizabeth’s family lived in exile in The Hague under the protection and hospitality of the Prince of Orange. (CSM III, Lloyd 162). In her wonderful account of Elizabeth’s life, Lloyd describes a woman whose philosophical strivings and capacities competed (and often lost) to the demands of courtly hospitality. Elizabeth was one of Descartes’ most stringent critics with respect to the plausibility of mind-body interaction in the context of his dualism. Genevieve Lloyd credits Elizabeth for compelling Descartes toward a more nuance understanding of the passions than the one he offered Pollot in his letter in January 1641. As Lloyd explains, “Descartes and Elizabeth are in search of a philosophy that is practical, in the sense that is applicable to the deliberations of the ancient Greek philosophers: 258

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immaterial mind controls the material body. “I admit,” she writes, “that it would be easier for me to concede matter and extension to the soul than to concede the capacity to the move the body to an immaterial thing.”260 With respect to the body’s action upon the soul, she writes, “…it is altogether very difficult to understand that a soul, as you have described it, after having had the faculty and the custom of reasoning well, can lose all of this by some vapors, and that being able to subsist without the body, and having nothing in common with it, the soul is still so governed by it.”261 Elizabeth’s powerful challenge to Descartes’ dualistic formulation of the mind-body union rests on their ontological distinction and their alleged independence. These two conditions, Elizabeth asserts, are incompatible with the notion that the mind and body act upon one another. Spinoza, as I’ll show in Chapter 3, pursues a related critique. Descartes’ response to Elizabeth is strange in that he addresses the intelligibility of the mind-body union, but not mind-body interaction. As Lisa Schapiro points out, Elizabeth is prepared to accept that the she can experience the mind and body as united, but she remains unconvinced by Descartes’ account of their causal

What is the good life in the midst of the affliction caused by the human passions and vicissitudes of fortune?” (Lloyd 168) Treating philosophy as a kind of medicine, Descartes and Elizabeth examine how philosophical reflection can be applied to daily life. I hope, in future projects, to reconstitute my reading of the Compendium through Descartes correspondence with Elizabeth. 260 Elizabeth, Countess Palatine. The Correspondence Between Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia and René Descartes. Ed. Lisa Schapiro. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007, 68. 261 Ibid, 68. 146

interactivity.262 Descartes eloquently explains that although the human being (and the world as such) is composed of two different substances, we are endowed with three explanatory notions for understanding those substances. The first two notions map easily onto mind and body; the understanding reflects on mental processes, while the imagination reflects on bodily materiality and other extended things. Does the addition of a third “notion” undermine Descartes otherwise stringent two-world metaphysic? This is a hotly contested issue. French Descartes and Spinoza scholar Martial Gueroult argued that the mind-body union constitutes a third substance in Descartes systems – une substance psychophysique.263 Regardless of the complexity of this claim, Descartes does assert that the mind-body union is “the bearer of distinct and irreducible properties in its own right.”264 As the sailor-in-a-ship metaphor illustrates, the mind-body union becomes the seat of sensations through which the mind experiences itself as though it were mixed with the body’s materiality. And so, perhaps it is no surprise that Descartes tells Elizabeth that conceiving the mind-body union is simply not a philosophical task: it emerges, instead, through experience. Descartes writes,

262

Lisa Shapiro. “The Other Voice.” In The Correspondence Between Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia and René Descartes. Ed. Lisa Schapiro. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. 263 Cottingham, 185. 264 Ibid., 185. 147

Those who never philosophize and who use only their senses do not in the least doubt that soul moves the body and that the body acts on the soul. But, they consider the one and the other as a single thing, that is to say, they conceive of their union.265 Sense experience constitutes the third “notion” through we come to understand ourselves and a substantially united mind-body complex. Now redeemed from the heuristic doubt to which Descartes submits them in the Meditations, the senses obtain a crucial role in articulating the completeness and insolubility of the human subjects. The senses, then, seem to redeem Descartes’ dualism from its complex and troubling contingencies. 2.8 Conclusion: Music, the Third Notion and the Mind-Body Union In his correspondence with Elizabeth, Descartes recommends a few different kinds of experiences through which we might maximize this sense of mind-body connectedness; he recommends that Elizabeth enjoy spa waters and reflect on the vital greenness of local gardens. As Descartes affirms, “…it is in using only life and ordinary conversations and in abstaining from meditating and studying those things which relate only to the imagination that we can learn to conceive of the union of soul

265

The Correspondence Between Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia and René Descartes, 69. 148

and body.”266 Might music, I ask in conclusion to the chapter, have constituted a powerful sensory affirmation of the mind-body union? This question belies another related query. If Descartes meant what he said when he told Mersenne he would have liked to return to music after having developed his mature conception of epistemological certainty, what would his new treatment of music have looked like? As I’ve argued, the rough outlines of Descartes’ dualism were in place as early as the Compendium. Bodily musical experience is automated, while sense experience yields pleasure in the immaterial domain of the soul. The Cartesian ear is a material thing that registers sounds material force, but its perceptual capacities also constitute the soul’s pleasure. The Cartesian ear thus sits at the threshold of body and soul, connecting these two constituent parts of the human being while embodying the contradictions immanent to their union. Hearing, as sense experience, belongs to both the immaterial mind and the material body – it is an instantiation of the “third notion” through which Descartes encourages Elizabeth to conceive of the mind-body union. The singing body, too, might do something similar. Singing emerges, first, in the Compendium in order to explain nothing more and nothing less than intervals like whole and half-steps. After explicating their mathematical derivation, Descartes wonders why half- and whole steps are extremely common in music despite their mathematical complexity and lack of pleasurable features. The reason: singing bodies.

266

Ibid., 70. 149

Half and whole steps mediate the effort those bodies exert when leaping between large consonant intervals. “A high pitch,” Descartes writes, “requires stronger breath in singing and a stronger stroke in plucking of strings than a low pitch.”267 Stepwise motion prevents the singer from putting undue strain on the voice, allowing to her “to rise to [the highest pitch] precisely by a step, easily and without such sudden forcing of breath.”268 Descartes’ discussion of the relation between the hearing and singing body is dense and somewhat confused. But it offers one of the few opportunities in the Compendium to trace sound from its source (that is, through its origin in the singing body) to its impact on the ear – its material (and not metaphorical, pace Erlmann) concussio. As it turns out, in Descartes’ logic, the force of the singer’s exertion is identical to the force with which sound strikes the ear, and thus stepwise motion can simultaneously mitigate large leaps’ effect on both the ear and the singing body. Although Descartes’ association of register with force and exertion is not exactly correct, it’s clear that undue sonic force, in this case, troubles the singing body and the ear in equal measure. Here, Descartes temporarily sets aside his interest in arithmetic proportionality and instead proffers a theory of sound transmission. Linking pitch, frequency and bodily effort, he writes, “a greater force will divide the air into smaller parts, which will make the resounding sound higher.”269 Nowhere else in the text does Descartes explicitly

267

Compendium, 31. Compendium, 31. 269 Compendium, 31. 268

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yoke sound to mechanical force. We trace sound, in this example, through three distinct material instantiations: the materiality of its production, the materiality of its transmission and the materiality of its perception. This process remarkably resembles the model of sense stimulation that Descartes’ offers in the Optics. Forces issue from some object (the voice, object along the path); they are then transmitted (through the air, through the walking stick) finally making contact with the perceiving subject (through the ear, or through the hand than grasps the stick.) Reading the Compendium with the Optics, we can see that Descartes’ mechanistic understanding of sense perception was in place in this first complete manuscript. But there is more. Now that the visual arts have become examplars of representational thinking, they represent actions of the imagination. Music, on the other hand, directs focus to sound’s impact on the material body and the pleasure it produces in the immaterial soul. That is, music works at the threshold of the mindbody union, aligning squarely with the third notion through which we understand the intimacy and supposed insolubility of that union. Erlmann’s overcommitment to the transhistorical distinction between reason and resonance prevents him from grasping the Compendium’s relationship to this “third notion.” Van Orden’s compelling prioritization of discipline in the Compendium doesn’t read far enough into his corpus to marshal music’s potential intervention upon dualism’s complex contingency. While Descartes’ account of music’s effect on the body is mechanical, the singing

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body is not simply equivalent to the automated dancing body that Descartes avows earlier in the text. The exigencies of this singing body intervene on Descartes’ mathematical prescription for how musical intervals should be structured. More specifically, the singing body generates an exception to the prescription that intervals constituted through complex ratios should be used sparingly. Although Descartes certainly does not ascribe any form of creative intelligence or aesthetic know-how to the body as such, it is clear that this singing body is not exactly on par with the raw, automated “matter” that Descartes describes earlier in the Compendium. While, here, Descartes, seems (perhaps unwittingly) to ascribe creative force to bodily action, this creative force will be appear as a robust ethical and epistemological project in Spinoza’s thought.

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Chapter Three Spinoza’s Substance and Matters of Expression 3.0 Introduction Descartes’ redrawn distinction between the mind and the body shapes his conception of friendship, sociality, politics, the arts and, of course, epistemology. My reading makes these distinctions legible through the relation of seeing to hearing and of painting to music. Painting draws us into the medium of thought, guiding us toward the cogito and its potential for social stabilization. Although Cartesian music is complexly imbricated in Descartes’ search for epistemological certainty, it ultimately places us on the tense threshold that separates the mind from the body. While Descartes doesn’t say as much, this distinction is social and political in character. Social and epistemological power rests with the cogito and pleasure with the body –and even if music does constitute some special instantiation of the “third notion,” its unclear what that status would mean in the registers of either the social or the political. And yet, as precisely that “third notion,” Cartesian music draws us to critical focus on the fundamental (though highly generative) problem with Descartes’ dualism: interaction. Music studies is attentive to Descartes’ allocation of social and political power to

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the cogito – and in response opposes the body to a social order founded on its normative autonomy. In Chapter One, I developed a constellation of questions aimed at delineating the key claims underlying music studies’ politicized anti-Cartesian treatment of the body. There, I asked: 1. What powers and capacities does music studies’ presume the body to have? 2. How is the substantial body’s ability to produce and circulate knowledge constructed as political intervention? 3. How do different conceptions of the mind-body union, separate or in relation to different conceptions of sonic materiality, produce contrastive visions of sociality and ethics? As I’ve argued, many of music studies’ answers to these questions are often implicitly dualistic in structure, even if they adopt stringent anti-Cartesian values. That is, the notion that the body opposes the mind is coherent only in a model that assumes that their relationship is antagonistic. And antagonistic they are: while music studies reconstructs the body as a site of social and political participation along the analytic axes of race, sex, gender and the activities of desire Descartes’ posits the body as mechanical and automated. While music studies asserts that the body does generate specialized (and under some conditions, secret) knowledge, Descartes famously quarantines it from the mind. While, for music studies, the body represents a force of sociality as such, Descartes looks to certain knowledge for the foundation of social life. 154

And yet, even as Descartes separates sound from that foundation, sound becomes a figure for and agent of relationality for Derrida, Merleau-Ponty, Nancy and Kant. But why do some forms of vibration, for Derrida, inappropriately foreclose on (or presume) knowledge about the other and why does sound foreclose on the production of knowledge, as such, for Kant? Taken together, these thinkers propose two options when it comes to thinking about how the materiality of listening disposes us toward the world: simply, it either closes us against that world, or opens us to it through the ear. Spinoza, too, crafts a link between materiality and relationality but his conception offers more complex modes of interaction than this openness/closure dyad presumes possible. This chapter examines Spinoza’s view on substance and materiality. For Spinoza, all matter is unified, which means that everything that exists is fundamentally made of the same stuff. This unity forms the grounds for Spinoza’s conception of sociality while producing new axes along which beings differ from one another and themselves. Matter, in Spinoza’s thought, is mutually affective in all directions. This means that the materialities with which we interact determine how we inhabit our own bodies – and we precipitate the same effects on others. This mutual affectivity grounds ethical and social life, which I’ll discuss in the next chapter. Spinoza’s substantial unity explicates our interaction with sonic materiality as a process of transformation and differentiation. While Cartesian matter is finite and mechanical, Spinozistic matter is immanently related to the creative force of Nature (or God, or

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Substance). This relation emplaces a strange and perhaps counter-intuitive capacity for expression within matter, which, I suggest, might lay the foundation for a new thinking of musical materiality. Spinoza’s reconfiguration of the mind-body union harnesses this creative expressivity in thought. My examination of the Spinozistic body, here, grounds later arguments about the body’s capacity to produce knowledge. What do we invest in, I ask throughout this chapter, when we trade the Cartesian body’s politicized antagonism for the Spinozistic body’s substantial unity with the rest of matter? 3.1 Deus sive natura: A New Substantiality Substance has played an important role at every turn in this project. After critiquing a metaphysics of substance that posits itself outside the realm of power, Elizabeth Povinelli seeks a limited conception of substantiality that envisions the production of a progressive ethics in and through the uneven distribution of vulnerability across social, ethical and political fields. Music studies, in contrast, has sought to invest substantial bodies with a capacity to produce knowledge that subtends a related capacity to challenge constituted power. Through Spinoza, I seek something of an interstitial space; by neutralizing the Cartesian opposition of mind and body, I animate Spinoza’s thought to fashion a new theoretical framework for understanding the production and circulation of power in/as the work of substantial

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bodies. Grasping all of the compelling transformations that Spinoza’s philosophy offers music studies requires, first, understanding his intervention on Descartes’ two substance metaphysic.270 As I’ve explained, Descartes’ ontology rests on a “master” substance (God) and two substances related equivocally to God: mind and body. Each substance’s properties can be referred back to its constitutive attribute: in the case of mind, the constitutive attribute is thought and in the case of body, extension. Here, the metaphysics of substance that Povinelli finds so objectionable articulates itself with exceptional clarity. For every thought the Cartesian thinker might have, no matter how creative or how radical, it will always be reducible to a single union of substance and attribute. Similarly, no matter how much the Cartesian subject might refine or cultivate her bodily capacities, that body will always be reducible to finite, mechanized material. Spinoza re-designs Descartes’ system by making thought and extension into attributes of a single, infinite substance. Everything that is, for Spinoza, exists in and through this unified substance. Against Descartes’ substance dualism, Spinoza proposes substance monism. The single substance of Spinoza is identified with God, and both substance and God are identified with Nature. “Whereas thought and

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William E. Connolly. Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006, 86.

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extension had been for Descartes attributes of two different kinds of substance, each dependent on God,” Genevieve Lloyd writes, “they become for Spinoza attributes of God himself.”271 But what does it mean to think of mind and body as attributes of a single substance? “By attribute,” writes Spinoza, “I mean what the intellect perceives of a substance as constituting its essence.”272 The attributes present human subjects with two unique and irreducible ways to conceive of substance. The locution “conceived under the attribute of thought (or extension)” will appear frequently throughout these next two chapters. Spinoza uses this locution to distinguish between when we’re supposed to be thinking of God (or substance) as infinite materiality or as an infinite intellect. The crucial thing to keep in mind, here, is that substance remains singular and unified regardless of the attribute under which we conceive it. Because Spinoza’s substance is infinite, it has infinitely many attributes. The finite human mind, however, can conceive only two attributes, both of which are familiar from Descartes’ dualism: thought and extension.273 Spinoza’s attributes are necessarily united within substance, so when we conceive substance under one of 271

Genevieve Lloyd. Part of Nature: Self Knowledge in Spinoza’s Ethics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994, 9. 272 Ethics, I, D4. 273 Bertrand Russell explicitly encourages readers of Spinoza not to treat humans’ access to merely two attributes as limitation or consolation. The infinity of attributes demonstrates that Spinoza’s world is world rife with potentiality through difference and variation. “We should not let our familiarity with mind and matter,” he writes, “blind us to the possibility that there may be a multiplicity of other ways of understanding reality.” Cited in Genevieve Lloyd. Spinoza and the Ethics. New York: Routledge, 1996, 37.

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these two attributes, we are really just adopting one of two possible perspectives on a single, unified thing. Stuart Hampshire offers a helpful model for thinking about the relation between attribute and substance simultaneously as a unity and a difference. In trying to understand Spinoza one has to get used to, and feel at ease with this double aspect, or Janus-face of things. …he thinks that whether we are facing an identity or a difference depend upon the angle from which we are observing the objects in question. The upside or downside of the sphere are inseparable, but they perhaps become distinguishable when we change our stance.274 No matter how many different perspectives we take on that sphere, we know that the object we’re looking at is singular and unified. Regardless of the attribute under which we conceive substance, we know that substance is unique. On the other hand, we also know that we can adopt different perspectives on that sphere which will be absolutely irreducible to one another. The attribute of thought and the attribute of extension express completely different aspects of substance and thus they are not reducible to one another. Though they are united within substance, the attributes are nonetheless independent of one another. Gilles Deleuze focuses on the expressive dimension of the attributes’ immanence to substance. While he outlines this reading of Spinoza in his doctoral thesis, 274

Stuart Hampshire. Spinoza and Spinozism. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005, xxi.

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Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza (pub.1968), he retains this interest in expression in his later work with Felix Guatarri. In the famous “Of the Refrain” from A Thousand Plateaus, the question how can matter become expressive motivates their theory of music and their conception of music history. Tracing “Of the Refrain” back to Deleuze’s earlier (and more soberly philosophical) work on Spinoza yields interesting perspectives on what a Spinozistic conception of musical materiality might be like. Deleuze initiates his expressive reading of Spinoza by unpacking the Sixth Definition from Part One of the Ethics. Identifying God with substance, Spinoza writes, “By God, I understand a being absolutely infinite, that is, a substance consisting of an infinity of attributes, each of which expresses an eternal and infinite essence.”275 Infinitely many attributes have the capacity to render forth substance’s infinite essence in an infinite number of ways. The attributes we know (thought and extension) render two aspects of God’s essence accessible to human subjects, thus “constituting our reality and rendering it thinkable.”276 The attributes produce substance as a world of thinkable and perceivable things. Deleuze radicalizes this reading by claiming that the attributes literally bring the essence of substance into knowable existence. He explains that “the essence of substance has no existence outside the attributes that express it so that each attribute 275

Gilles Deleuze. Trans. Martin Joughin. Expressionism in Philosophy. New York: Zone, 1993, 13. 276 Pierre Macherey. Trans. Ted Stoltze. In a Materialist Way: Selected Essays. Ed. Warren Montag. New York: Verso, 1998, 125.

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expresses a certain eternal and infinite essence.”277 Expression is a dynamic and productive action that brings substance’s essence into being. Both Deleuze and French literary critic Pierre Macherey develop three-part models for schematizing expressive production. The three parts are all absolutely dependent on one another and they all “belong” to one another in a certain way. Both Deleuze and Macherey first identify something that expresses itself (in this case, substance), something that is brought into being through its expression (in this case, the essence) and the agent through which that thing is brought into being (in this case, the attribute). In addition to grasping what Hampshire calls the “Janus-faced” doubleness of the attributes’ relation to substance, the Ethics challenges us to grasp substance through many different, though equivalent names. In addition to God, or nature (Deus sive nature), Spinoza describes substance as natura naturans, translated as “naturing nature.” Substance is the only instance of natura naturans in Spinoza’s thought. It is the creative and generative force whose expression constitutes the very fabric of reality. To natura naturans, Spinoza opposes natura naturata (“natured nature”) which refers to things that depend on God for their existence – this includes every individual thing that exists. Indeed, as Spinoza asserts in Part I of the Ethics “whatever is, is in God and nothing can be or be conceived without God.”278

277 278

Deleuze, 42. Ethics, I P15. 161

Individual things are nothing more or less than modifications of substance. 279 All modes can be conceived under the attributes of thought and extension. As Spinoza explains, “a mode of extension and an idea of that mode are one and the same thing, but expressed in two ways.”280 Just as substance remains singular and unified regardless of the attribute under which we conceive it, so do individual modes themselves. This will become crucial for Spinoza’s conception of the mind-body union. Spinoza doesn’t thematize expression the way his twentieth-century interlocutors do, but Macherey emphasizes that Spinoza’s expressive understanding of reality opposes the “representative conception at the heart of Cartesian thought.”281 Rather than merely obey mechanical laws (I’ll explicate Spinoza’s physics in section 3.4), Spinozistic matter (substance conceived under the attribute of extension) expresses an aspect of substance’s infinite essence. In this sense, matter is constitutively expressive in Spinoza’s monism. So, what can Deleuze and Guatarri mean when they ask how

279

In a non-geometrical draft of the Ethics, Spinoza uses “mode” interchangeably with “creature,” helping us think of modes as living things which express some aspect of substance’s creative power. “Turning now to universal Natura naturata or those modes of creatures which immediately depend on, or have been, created by God – we know only two of these: motion in matter and intellect in the thinking thing.” Baruch Spinoza. Trans. Edwin Curley.“A Non-Geometrical Draft.” In The Ethics and Other Works. Ed. Curley. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. 280 Ethics, II, P7, Scholium. 281 Macherey, 123 (emphasis added).

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matter can become expressive? And what would that have to do with the specific materiality of music? 3.2 The Musical Spinoza? Unlike Descartes, Spinoza never wrote a manuscript about music, much less a secret text rife with complex implications of his own philosophical trajectory. In fact, he wrote very little about artistic production at all. Like Descartes, however, Spinoza rejected Neo-Platonic ideas about musical harmony, although the grounds for his rejection are different from Descartes’. While Descartes cleaves music from cosmology by aligning it with sound, Spinoza attacks the anthropomorphic vision of God upon which that cosmology is based. In Part I of the Ethics, after having laid out his immanent conception of God, thereby stripping God of any human qualities (benevolence, vengeance, etc.), Spinoza develops a rather vicious critique of the human presumption that God has made worldly things for their pleasure and welfare. The assumption that God acts for the sake of human happiness misunderstands the divine nature. This kind of thinking not only makes us susceptible to superstition (thus easily taken in by constituted power) it also stands in the way of our pursuit of adequate ideas, joyful rationality and bodily empowerment. Here, Spinoza catalogues how these myriad mistakes unfold in all five sensory domains. But notice how the sense of hearing seems to take on more importance than the other sense modalities.

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The ignorant consider [the affectations of the imagination] to be the chief attributes of things, because, as we have already said, they believe all things have been made for their sake, and call the nature of a thing good or evil, sound or rotten and corrupt, as they are affected by it. Those which move the senses through the nose, they call pleasant smelling or stinking, through the tongue, sweet, bitter, tasty or tasteless, through touch, hard or soft, rough or smooth and the like; and finally, those which move the ears are said to produce noise, sound or harmony. Men have been so mad as to believe that God is pleased by harmony. Indeed, there are philosophers who have persuaded themselves that the motions of the heavens produce a harmony.282

The problem here is that we conflate the moral value of sense experiences with whether we like them or not. Some sounds are pleasing and harmonious, some noisy and noxious, some sights are beautiful and some smells rotten. But the mistake that underlies these judgments is the belief that sense experiences are tailored to our wellbeing by a benevolent God. The metaphysical basis for this set of claims in Appendix I emerges only through the sense of hearing, framing the harmony of the spheres as a paradigmatic discourse against which Spinoza elaborates his philosophical position. Like any material thing or object of sense, Spinozistic artworks will be constituted “in” God, but they will not be aimed at pleasing God in any way. 282

Ethics, I, Appendix. 164

The most egregious error that human subjects make, according to this Appendix, is to “place themselves at the origin of every perception, every action, every object and every meaning.”283 This anthropocentrism forecloses on a richer understanding of the causal networks of which we are merely a part, not a cause. This misattribution belies the fact that human subjects believe themselves to be freely disposed towards one thing over another simply by virtue of being “conscious of their volitions and appetite,” thereby failing to “think of what moves them to wanting or willing.”284 The Ethics is itself a master class in cultivating responsibility for our actions through refining our mental and bodily relationships to substance and its modes. Freedom, for Spinoza, comes not through a lack of determination, but through adequate knowledge of how and why we are disposed towards some actions and not others. Over the course of the Ethics, Spinoza will unseat this misattribution of both causality and freedom by dispensing with the cogito, or the agent that Althusser calls “the master of the world’s meaning.”285 Because God (or substance) can be conceived under the attributes of thought and extension, Spinoza’s God can be thought of as an infinitely powerful intellect and as an infinitely creative expanse of matter. Spinoza famously uses the locution Deus sive natura to describe God’s mental and material attributes – God, or Nature. As Susan

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Louis Althusser. “The Only Materialist Tradition Part I: Spinoza.” In Warren Montag and Ted Stoltze. The New Spinoza. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997, 6. 284 Hasana Sharp. “The Force of Ideas in Spinoza.” Political Theory. Vol. 35, No. 6 (Dec., 2007), pp. 732-755. 285 Ibid., 6. 165

James explains, “substance [God] is not just a static abstract statement of the most powerful causal concepts by which nature is governed; it is the actual instantiation of those concepts in nature.”286 Spinoza’s God is the order of nature as such. Spinoza argues that the achievement of adequate knowledge entails giving up the anthropomorphic notion that God has arranged reality for the any aim in particular, including the aims of human beings. When I refer to “God,” throughout the course of the next two, chapters, I’ll be following Spinoza usage, unless “God’s” interchangeability with Nature or substance warrants mention.287 Spinoza may have absorbed this position on the harmony of the spheres (and the rejection of a transcendent God that attends it) from Jewish philosopher Maimonides (1138- 1204). Like Spinoza, Maimonides rejects the ascription of any human qualities 286

Susan James. Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy. Oxford: Clarendon, 1999, 138. 287 The historical affiliation of Spinoza with pantheism through Deus sive natura is rich and complex. John Dewey distinguishes between two kinds of pantheism. One elevates things to the status of God and the other “brings God down to things.” John Dewey. “The Pantheism of Spinoza.” In Journal of Speculative Philosophy. Vol. 16, No. 3 (July 1882): pp. 249-257. As Lloyd points out, neither of these procedures fit Spinoza very well. “God,” she writes, “must something more than the world to be worth the bother of elevating the world to his status.” Genevieve Lloyd. Spinoza and the Ethics. New York: Routledge, 1996, 38. Rather, as Lloyd continues, the Spinozistic world is “in” God in a strong sense, but the world is not God as such. Stephen B. Smith offers a concise account of the revival of Spinozism in the German Counter-Enlightenment in the 1780 and 1790s. Known as the Pantheismusstreit, Smith explains, these debates were initiated in part through publicization of Gotthold Lessing’s interest in Spinoza. Led by F.H. Jacobi, Lessing’s interest in Spinoza sparked a debate about the extent to which “a pantheistic system, a religion of divine immanence, leads not only to atheism but to a radical determinism with no room for human freedom and agency.” Steven B. Smith. Spinoza’s Book of Life: Freedom and Redemption in the Ethics. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003, 185.

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to God. Maimonides also rejected the use of music in religious services because of its inflammatory and passionate effects. In what little he has to say about music, Spinoza is much more forgiving. Maimonides rejected the Greek notion of harmonia as a sonorous instantiation of celestial order. In their compelling article about Maimonides’ “silence” on the matter of cantillation and music more generally, Werner and Kravitz asserts that Maimonides, “only cites passages where the ‘tremendous noise’ of the sun or other celestial bodies are being marveled at. The Greek concept of harmonia, i.e. fitting together in a cosmic or transcendental way would have been totally alien to him.”288 Although Spinoza rejects the notion that artworks replicate cosmic order, he does craft a conception of artworks consistent with his immanent understanding of God, nature and substance. This conception emerges from Spinoza’s direct engagement with Descartes, where he wagers what Deleuze calls the equivalent of a philosophical war cry: the assertion that we do not know what a body can do.

3.3 What Can a Body Do?

At the beginning of Part III of the Ethics, Spinoza writes, “No one knows what the body can do determined from the laws of Nature alone,” adding that “[no one knows] what the body can do only if it is determined by the mind.”289 Deleuze takes a polemical stance on this passage, claiming that as long as we think of the mind and 288

“The Silence of Maimonides.” E. Werner and L. Kravitz. in Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research. Vol. 53 (1986) pp. 179-201., 190. 289 Ethics, II, P2 Scholium. 167

body as governed by the obligation to control and obey (respectively) we are speaking only of moral obligations, not powers and abilities. Stuart Hampshire puts a finer point on what kinds of powers Deleuze might be talking about. He writes, “[Spinoza] is certainly thinking of powers that would arise from complex brain states, and hence also from the preconscious rather than the conscious mind.”290 Rejecting the body’s subjection to mental control, Spinoza affirms that the body can always exceed what we assume its capacities to be. Spinoza’s engagement with art emerges as a radicalized addendum to his rejection of the mind’s control over the body. In the Meditations, Descartes uses the dreaming doubt, in tandem with the painting analogy, to draw the meditator into the medium of mental representation. Spinoza uses a similar example to demonstrate body’s immunity to mental control. “Sleepwalkers do a great many things in their sleep which they would not dare to while awake,” Spinoza claims, “[which] shows well enough that the body itself, simply from the laws of its own nature, can do many things that which its mind wonders at.”291 Spinoza then illustrates a parallel relation of mental and bodily capacities by asking us to consider that “when the body is at rest in sleep, the mind remains senseless with it, nor does it have the power of thinking, as it does when we are awake.”292 The mind’s tendency to wander incoherently through dreams is evidence, for Spinoza, to its constitution in and through the body’s degree of activity. The sleeping body constitutes an inactive mind. 290

Hampshire, xliii. Ethics, II, P2 Scholium. 292 Ethics, II, P2 Scholium. 291

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One of the hardest things to grasp about Spinoza’s thinking is the notion that the attributes are united from the perspective of substance, but that they don’t interact in a causal way. Consequently, each attribute contains the causes of all the modes conceived through it. Ideas act upon other ideas and bodies act upon bodies, but there is no interaction across the attributes. As Margaret Wilson explains, “although the causes of a mode must be found exclusively under it own attribute, there is an extremely intimate relation between the ‘order’ of those causes, and thus the order of knowledge.”293 In one of the most important, but possibly the most abstract propositions in the Ethics, Spinoza asserts that “the order and connection of things is the same as the order and connection of ideas.”294 If a single mode is, in fact, “one and the same thing expressed in two ways,” the causal relationships in which a mode participates will also be expressed in two ways that are at once unified and independent. Movement, under the attribute of extension is caused by movement through and though. Ideas, under the attribute of thought, act upon one another. The attributes share a correspondent, but not a causal relationship. So, when Spinoza considers art objects under the attribute of extension, he considers them solely as consequences of material action and movement. They [Cartesians] will say that it cannot happen that the causes of buildings, of paintings and of things of this kind, which are made only 293

Margaret Wilson. “Spinoza’s Theory of Knowledge.” In The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza. Ed. Don Garrett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996., 97. 294 Ethics, IIP7. 169

by human skill, should be able to be deduced by the laws of nature alone, insofar as it is only considered to be corporeal; nor would the human body be able to build a temple if it were not determined or guided by the mind. But I have already shown that they do not know what the body can do or what can be deduced from the consideration of its nature alone, and that they know from experience that a great many things can happen from the laws of Nature alone which they never would have believed could happen without the direction of the mind – such as the things that sleepwalkers do in their sleep, which they wonder at while they are awake.295 In this remarkable passage, Spinoza frames artworks exclusively as products of bodily skill. Though artistic production clearly entails a high degree of bodily specialization, that specialization derives from the laws of Nature, not the direction of the mind. Painting, building and playing an instrument, it seems, are no different than sleepwalking with regard to their independence from mental administration. But this is not to say that these activities are mechanized, uncommitted or affectively unengaged. Rather, what Spinoza implies here is that artistic production activates the unthought and unanticipated in matter. Importantly, these capacities are immanent to matter itself. Human bodies can be conceived as part of this production insofar as we 295

Ethics, II, P2 Scholium. 170

consider them to be like the materialities with which they interact through the production of art works. The substantial unity articulated through Spinoza’s monism shifts the terrain upon which I have been constructing separate lines of inquiry about musical bodies and sonic materiality. The notion that everything “in” the Spinozistic world is “in” a single, unified substance means that human subjects are not qualitatively different from the instruments or sonic vibrations that constitute music’s complex materiality. Because everything is constituted within a single substance, Spinoza is no longer under obligation, as was Descartes, to draw what Michael Della Rocca calls a “principled line” between thinking and non-thinking things.296 Everything, Spinoza asserts, is somehow animate, “though in different degrees.”297 This doesn’t mean that, say, my viola is going to think up a dissertation topic and then go ahead and write a dissertation; as I’ll explain, any thing’s mental capacities are constituted by the range of actions of which its capable. As Althusser points out, Spinoza rejects the Cartesian cogito as the “original foundation for every truth” and replaces it with not only homo cogitat (“man thinks”) but the substantially unified claim – things think.298 Spinoza’s substance monism effaces the principled line between the human and the non-human that is drawn so clearly in Descartes dualism. As Jane Bennett suggests, what we might have once considered “things” appear both more familiar in 296

Michael DellaRocca. Spinoza. New York: Routledge, 2008., 110. Della Rocca, 115. 298 Althusser, 5. 297

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virtue of the animate capacities we now share with them, but at the same time become less familiar in virtue of our loss of mental sovereignty over their materiality.299 Thus, thinking of Spinozistic matter as something with which we are fundamentally unified requires a much different array of critical positions than straightforwardly antiCartesian positions make possible. While the anti-Cartesian body of music studies mobilizes its qualitative difference from the mind as a form of political opposition, the Spinozistic body simply modulates its expressive relation to substance. This body’s “agency” contrasts radically with the political and epistemological agency that anti-Cartesian music studies ascribes to the body. As Don Garrett helpfully explains, “human beings cannot act independently of, or separately from God’s own activity, and every human action must be conceived as a manifestation of nature; but it also implies, on the other hand, that there is a prospect for a kind of direct participation in the divine.”300 Our actions are, in a sense, determined by the infinite Nature of which we are a part, but Nature’s very constitution in/as God allows us to think those actions as expressions of substance’s immanent creativity – as expressions, in Jane Bennett’s words, of a materiality that is always in the process of reinventing itself.301 3.4 Motion and Rest

299

Jane Bennett. “The Force of Things: Steps Towards an Ecology of Matter.” Political Theory. Vol. 32, No. 3. (Jun., 2004), pp. 347-372. 300 Garrett, 270. 301 Bennet, 357.

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But I began by asking, with Deleuze and Guatarri, how matter becomes expressive. While matter simply expresses substance’s essence under the attribute of extension, Deleuze and Guatarri are after something more specific. How do individual modes of substance express their essence and what parameters maximize and minimize that expressive potential? Thinking this question transposes the tripartite structure for expression from the register of substance into the register of modes. That is, how does a mode (as something that expresses itself) express an otherwise unknowable essence and what agent (in the manner of the attributes) renders forth that essence? Each body, Spinoza asserts, “expresses God’s essence (under the attribute of extension) in a certain and determinate way.”302 A body simply is its variable capacity to express some finite zone of substance’s essence though its worldly interactions. And yet, while bodies are “certain and determinate” in what Deleuze calls their “degree of power,” injunctions to specialize, refine, enrich or amplify our bodily capacities echo like a refrain throughout the Ethics. “In proportion as a body is more capable of doing many things at once, or being acted on in many ways at once,” Spinoza asserts, “so its mind is capable of perceiving many things at once.”303 Spinoza implies that embodied practices that hone our abilities to listen for miniscule detail, to attend to subtle gradations in color and texture and to connect details culled from multiple sense modalities give us access to parallel degrees of detail in nuance 302 303

Ethics, II, D1. Ethics II, P12. 173

in our thinking. Spinoza spends some time, in Part II of the Ethics, teaching us how to understand the myriad bodies to which his monism exposes us. Because understanding the Spinozistic mind-body union entails first understanding the body, grasping the nature of material bodies becomes a crucial building block for our selfknowledge. In the long scholia that follow Proposition 13 from Part II of the Ethics (known as the “Physical Digression”) Spinoza explains the physics of bodies which later becomes crucial for his theory of knowledge. He begins by examining features of simple, single bodies, and then charts their aggregation into individuals, human beings and, finally, the whole of nature. “Bodies are distinguished from one another,” Spinoza writes, “by reason of motion and rest, speed and slowness and not by reason of substance.”304 Moving beyond Brian Massumi’s suggestion that movement be conceived as a form of transformation, Spinoza suggests that a body’s very identity rests in its range of movement. This range describes what the body is able to do. As

304

Ethics, II, P13, L1. This locution “reason of motion and rest” appears in a few different forms in the secondary literature on Spinoza. Lloyd retains the Latin ratio, referring to bodies as constituted through ratios of motion to rest. I find this valuable because it implies that the body’s identity lies in the comparative relation between the upper and lower thresholds of its abilities. In Practical Philosophy, Deleuze opts simply for “relation.” Some refer to this set of parameters as a “proportion of motion to rest,” (Gabbey, 1996). Gabbey, in particular points out that Spinoza’s argument for the universal interaction of ratios of motion to rest lacks a quantitative foundation and is therefore mathematically unintelligible (Gabbey 169). Alan Gabbey. “Spinoza’s Natural Science and Methodology.” In The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza. Ed. Don Garrett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

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Deleuze explains, a Spinozistic conception of bodies will ask two interlocking questions: what is the structure of a body? And what can a body do?305 A simple body’s imbrication with other matter determines how it inhabits the range of capacities circumscribed by its propensity to motion and rest. Bodies are singular things which are distinguished from another by reason of motion to rest and so must be determined to motion or rest by another singular thing, namely by another body, which either moves or is at rest. But this body also could not move or be at rest if it had not been determined by another to motion or rest, and this again (by the same reason) and by another and so on to infinity.306 How each body inhabits its constitutive ratio is determined by the movement of the infinitely many bodies that surround it. All matter constitutes an infinite network of variable movement of which we are always-already in the middle. In this network, each simple body affects and is affected by the myriad bodies to which it is connected. At the level of its simplest bodies, matter constantly regenerates through variation and transformation. All modes by which a body is affected by another body follow both from the nature of the body affected and at the same time from the

305 306

Deleuze, 218. Ethics, II, P13, Lemma 3, Demonstration.

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nature of the affecting body so that one and the same body may be moved differently according to the different nature of the bodies moving it. And conversely, different bodies may be moved by one and the same body.307 In the infinite concatenation of matter that simply is substance conceived under the attribute of extension, no body can affect another’s ratio without being affected itself. Thus movement, or, in Spinoza’s words “speeds and slowness” become synonymous with variation and transformation. We are always caught in the middle of these ongoing transformations, and are thus determined, with respect to how we inhabit our own ratio of motion to rest, by the infinite number of bodies to which we are substantially joined. And yet, though we are substantially unified with infinitely many bodies, we can intensify that unity by forming composite individuals with compatible bodies. Spinoza does not refer to bodies as “individuals” until he begins to examine how simple bodies join together to form composite bodies.308 Like simple bodies, the construction and maintenance of composite bodies are related to motion and rest and the spectrum of capacities that ratio circumscribes. Spinoza explains somewhat cryptically that,

307 308

Ethics, II, P13, Lemma 3, A1” Lloyd, 11; Gabbey 168. 176

when a number of bodies….whether of the same or of different size…so move, whether with same degree of different levels of speed, so that they communicate their motions to each other in a certain fixed manner, we shall say that those bodies are united with one another and that they composed an individual which is distinguished from the others by this union of bodies.309 Here, any number of simple bodies communicate motion to another creating a consistent ratio of motion to rest. This now-singular individual circumscribes a new set of capacities and, like simple bodies, can join with one another, creating larger and larger individuals. This infinite aggregation extends throughout the order of nature. As long as a composite body retains its ratio of motion to rest, it can undergo any number of changes in its size or shape without losing its nature. As Lloyd clarifies, “A hierarchy of individuals, thus conceived, reaches up to the universe as a whole, which can itself be conceived as an individual continuing to exist despite the generation, change, decay that occur within it. Each individual is thus enmeshed in a more comprehensive one, reaching up to the all-encompassing individual – ‘the whole of nature.’”310

309 310

Ethics, II, P13, Lemma 3, A”, Definition. Lloyd, 11-12.

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Our imbrication in the infinite individual that is Nature yields a much different perspective on part-whole relationships than the one Descartes’ derives from dualism. Recall that Descartes’ discussion of rational love outlines a network of conditions under which it is advantageous for us to join ourselves to another thing or person. Spinoza, in contrast, sees this prioritization of part-whole relationships as a failure, on our part, to understand the constitution of Nature and our role in it. In a famous letter of 20 November 1665, Spinoza explains this position through a particularly memorable metaphor. Spinoza likens our existence in the universe to a tiny worm living in the blood of a human being.311 As it watches the blood particles move through the bloodstream, the worm has no idea how or why those particles are determined to move in the way that they do. The worm regards particles of the blood as wholes in and of themselves precisely because it doesn’t understand how the composite body determines the particles to movement. The better understanding grasps these particles as parts of a larger system (the human being) – which is, in turn, a part of a still larger system (the whole of Nature). We, Lloyd explains, are like the worm in the blood. We live in a tiny domain within an infinite material expanse, but we ought to strive to understand the bodies that surround us as parts by which there is “preserved in the whole universe the same

311

Spinoza develops this notion in correspondence with Henry Oldenburg, the first Secretary of the Royal Society of Science, who was one of Spinoza’s important links to the official scientific community. Gabbey, 148.

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ratio of motion to rest.”312 To the extent that we regard things in the world around us as supposedly autonomous wholes, we fail see the universe as an infinite concatenation of parts. By sensitizing ourselves towards these larger systems, we begin to comprehend the universe itself as a system of “perpetual reciprocity.”313 While Descartes’ rational love ascribes disparate values to joining with some things over others, Spinoza challenges us to think of ourselves as parts in the middle of an infinite concatenation of systems. Spinozistic love, I’ll explain in the next chapter, emerges through the joyful understanding of this fact of being in the middle. 3.5 Matters of Expression Two points stand out in Spinoza’s theory of bodies. One: bodies are constituted through their capacity for motion. And two: bodies join with one another by coordinating those capacities, creating larger individuals with new capacities that exceed the sum of their parts. These dual parameters describe the material projects of inorganic things, human beings and animals. In 20th century thought, these capacities have garnered theoretical force under many names; Manuel Delanda calls them “inorganic life,” Deleuze refers to a “machinic phylum” and Jane Bennett develops the concept of “thing-power materialism.”314 All of these thinkers trace their engagement

312

Lloyd, 12. Ibid., 12. 314 Manuel Delanda. “Nonorganic Life.” In Incorporations. Ed. Jonathan Crary and Sandford Swinter. New York: Zone, 1992.; Deleuze and Guatarri, 409; Bennett, 348. 313

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with matter to Spinoza, usually through Friedrich Nietzsche and Henri Bergson. Delanda poses his conception of “inorganic life” as a challenge to what he calls a centuries-old devotion to “conservative systems” – that is, the notion that physical systems strive toward and eventually stabilize at a point of steady-state equilibrium.315 Citing the complex oscillations of chemical clocks, soliton waves and clouds, Delanda casts matter as capable of creative, nonlinear and unstable patterning. And he does so under the rubric of expression. “Matter,” he writes, “can ‘express’ itself in complex and creative ways, and our awareness of this must be incorporated into any future materialist philosophy.”316 Although Delanda politicizes matter’s expressivity, he develops a highly sensitized way of reading the transmission of motion in matter’s complex patterns of assembly. By so doing, he uses a nonanthropocentric conception of a familiar explanatory frame for the transmission of social cues through rhythmic motion: entrainment. Drawing on the work of biologist Alan Garfinkel, he defines entrainment, simply as a “spontaneous emergence of temporal or spatial patterns” in matter and animals.317 Populations of crickets entrain each other to chirp coherently. Populations of fireflies come to cohere in flashing. Entrainment takes

315

Delanda, 129. Delanda, 133. 317 Manuel Delanda. “Nonorganic Life.” In Incorporations. Ed. Jonathan Crary and Sandford Swinter. New York: Zone, 1992.,130. 316

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place in laser light, which differs form ordinary light in that the photons oscillate “in phase” resulting in the emission of a coherent beam.318 For Delanda, entrainment is about more than the coordination of rhythmic patterning; its about conceiving that patterning as a reaction to events and problems within larger systems. Entrainment has a problem-solving valence, he explains, to the extent that it occurs in response to pressures and events with in a larger milieu or situation. By forming an individual that differentiates itself from its milieu through unified movement, entrained materialities take a critical stance on that milieu.319 Ultimately, Delanda argues for a conception of the political that can somehow take into account the critical capacities of non-organic life. A much different conception of entrainment emerges from two discursive zones in music studies. In her aural and embodied study of Steve Reich’s Different Trains (1988), Naomi Cumming uses entrainment to explain how “the mechanization of movement is able to elicit a response of empathetic bodily motion” in the context of Trains rhythmic ostinato.320 Using Jacuqes Lacan’s three-part partition of psychic life into the “Real,” “Symbolic” and “Imaginary,” Cumming aligns the process of being

318

Ibid., 152. By way of example, Delanda discusses the propensity of amoebas to elaborate consistent motions only when threatened with dangerously low-levels of environmental nutrients. Delanda, 152. 320 Naomi Cumming. “The Horrors of Identification: Steve Reich’s Different Trains.” Perspectives of New Music. Vol. 35., No. 1 (Winter 1997), pp. 129-152. 319

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entrained by the ostinato with the “Real” – an unrepresentable, pre-social and prelinguistic state that lacks any distinction between inside/outside, self/other and body/world. Lacking such distinction, the “Real” is fundamentally a regressive position – and in the case of Trains it is induced by a rhythmic participation that can Cumming insists can be experienced as alternately “comforting or horrifying by turns.”321 The most important aspect of Cumming’s entrainment, for my argument, is that is both regressive and bodily. While Cumming’s method (a self-conscious rejection of visual analysis) foregrounds the body as an agent for the production of knowledge, her anti-Cartesian move is undermined by a Lacanian frame that posits bodily engagement with rhythm as a regressive force. Although Cumming accounts (as, for example, McClary does not) for the intimate experience of recognizing music’s rhythmic impetus, gestures and contour as though they were her own, this recognition unfolds through a confusion between where the listening body ends and sonorous gestures begin. This formulation is not unlike the historically normative association of hearing with immersion. Kant’s indictment of music’s spatial dispersal is, in its own way, a charge of regression: music unseats critical thought and forces social participation. Take together, Cumming and Delanda produce two highly conflictive conceptions of entrainment: where Delanda conceives entrained coordination as retaining, or perhaps even enhancing

321

Cumming, 133. 182

individuation, Cumming posits rhythmic motion as an effacement of the subject’s borders. While Cumming’s entrainment places the body on the outskirts of the social and historical, some more recent engagements treat entrainment as a form of social production. Recent research in entrainment processes sees the ability to embody rhythmic patterns as a crucial component of social participation. In their remarkably clear overview of recent cognitive work, Phillips-Silver, Aktipis and Bryant develop a position on social entrainment that rests on our ability to process spatio-temporal cues from another individual. This process unfolds, like Spinoza’s expression, in three parts: (1) the ability to detect rhythmic signals in the environment, including rhythmic signals the issue from locomotion; (2) the ability to processes rhythmic signals; and (3) the ability to integrate sensory information and motor production that enables adjustment of motor output based on rhythmic input.322 This three-part scheme narrates how we accommodate and reproduce the rhythmic behaviors of others. A “New” Musicological reading of this process might demand a critical “fourth” space in which to assess the social provenance and political implications of the spatiotemporal signals we accommodate, acknowledging that entrainment can activate progressive and well as constrictive social processes. A Spinozistic conception of

322

C. Athena Aktipis, Gregory A. Bryant, Jessica Phillips-Silver. Music Perception: An Interdiscplinary Journal. Vol. 28, No. 1. (September 2010)., 6.

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matter and movement grasps not only how matter generates consistent patterns of movement, but sees that process as inextricable from what is expressed in and through the process of becoming-consistent. Cumming’s Lacanian account lacks the distinctions necessary for articulating such a process, while the cognitive account is limited by its focus on reproducing another’s rhythmic cues. I am interested in a method (and not necessarily one that goes by the name “entrainment”) that, like Delanda’s, retains individuation, but unlike the cognitive approach, grasps larger systems and more diverse materials in a less centralized way. For Delanda, as for Spinoza, coordinated movement emerges through the interaction between component parts of the system itself. While systems can thus remain regulative and normative, they are also immanent open to change and destabilization. They are open, in other words, to the possibility that we do not know what a body can do. And so, we are back to the question of matter’s expressivity. While the attribute of extension, for Spinoza, expresses one aspect of substances’ essence, each individual mode expresses some unique subset or spectrum of substance’s essence as well. Making matter expressive, for Deleuze and Guatarri, entails exploring and thus maximizing the expressive potential of individual modes – and this occurs through their mutually affective relationship with other modes. They describe the process of stabilizing this mutual affectivity as operations of consistency, which fulfill the expressive role of the attributes in the tri-partite model I outlined above.

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“Material thus has three principal characteristics,” they write, “it is a molecularized matter; it has a relation to forces to be harnessed; and it is defined by operations of consistency applied to it.”323 Translating this formula into Spinozistic terms, we could simply begin by saying that bodies exist. They are “molecular” in the sense that each simple body expresses substance’s essence in its own “certain and determinate” way. However, when bodies unify by coordinating, elaborating or complexifying the way the move and rest, they become consistent. This new range of movement expresses a new range of capacities and a new expressive relation to substance. As Deleuze and Guatarri elaborate, “Consistency necessarily occurs between heterogeneities not because is it the birth of differentiation, but because heterogeneities that were formerly content to coexist or succeed one another become bound up with one another through ‘consolidation’ of that coexistence and succession.”324 So, how does this work with bodies that exist with more worldly specificity than the ones Spinoza schematizes in the Physical Digression? As Elizabeth Grosz elaborates, the Australian tooth-billed catbird, known colloquially as the Stagemaker, is one of the most interesting creatures through which Deleuze and Guattari examine matter’s expressivity.325 The stagemaker earns his name because he’ll sing only after

323

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guatarri. Trans. Brian Massumi. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987, 345. 324 Ibid, 330. 325 Elizabeth Grosz. Chaos, Territory, Art: Gilles Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.

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collecting and arranging shiny, upturned leaves to form a “display-court” upon which to present his song. Here, the stagemaker and the leaves activate a mutually affective relationship by which the leaves activate the bird’s sonorous capacities, and the bird reveal the leaves to have a sonorous capacity. The bird and the leaves are “expressers;” they start out as co-existent singularities or “molecularized” things. When consolidated, they begin to elaborate a mutual relation to sonorousness, which will then need to somehow be “expressed.” This sonorousness becomes a “thinkable reality” when the bird sings, expressing the sonic potential immanent to its composite formation with the leaves. This analysis tracks how matter becomes expressive of sonorousness, but it doesn’t explain how sonic material becomes musically expressive. Like all materialities in Spinoza’s ontology, sounds are modes of God. As such, they bear an immanent relation to the infinitely variable forces that animate all matter. By virtue of its substantial unity with the rest of matter, sonic materiality should be thinkable according to the same three-part schematic that describes Spinozistic expression. But Deleuze takes this even further, using sonic materiality to model Spinoza’s understanding of simple bodies and their constitution through movement. Here, he imports Spinoza’s language of “speed and slowness” to describe the production of musical form. The important thing is to understand life, each living individuality, not as a form or a development of form, but as a

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complex

relation

between

different

velocities,

between

deceleration and acceleration of particles. A composition of speeds and slownesses on a plane of immanence. In the same way, a musical form will depend on a complex relation between speeds and slownesses of sound particles. It is not just a matter of music but of how to live; it is by speed and slowness that one slips in among things, that one connects with something else.326 While I will deal with the seemingly prescriptive ethical elements of this passage in the next chapter, for now let it suffice to say that musical form, in this passage, is constituted in the manner of the Spinozistic composite body. Musical form assumes the force of exemplarity through an isomorphic mapping of the musical “sound particle” onto the Spinozistic simple body. This analogical relation is part of a larger privilege of music in Deleuze (and Guattari’s) thought, which accounts partly for how they understand music’s expressive relation to substance. Music, Deleuze argues, realizes substance’s creativity with a speed and intensity that is surpassed only by philosophy itself. By likening sound to the most basic units of expressive matter (in this case, the Spinozistic simple body), Deleuze imbues sound with nearly unlimited expressive power. In other words, the “certain and determinate way” that sound expresses some domain of substance’s essence is especially flexible

326

Gilles Deleuze. Trans. Robert Hurley. Practical Philosophy. San Francisco: City Lights, 1988.

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and open by virtue of its high degree of “molecularization.” In the now-familiar language of consolidation, Deleuze and Guattari explain: “it is a problem of consistency and consolidation: how to consolidate the material so that it can harness the unthinkable, invisible non-sonorous forces…Music molecularizes matter and in so doing becomes capable of harnessing non-sonorous forces such as Duration and Intensity.”327 The Bergsonian language is unmistakable here. By harnessing Bergsonian dureé, Deleuze implies, music expresses a vital force that underlies all experience, articulated by continuous and interpenetrating difference without opposition. Here, dureé becomes a cognate for substance. In Chapter One, I situated sonic materiality, vis-à-vis the figure of vibration, between two undecidable oppositions. First, with Dyson, I posited sound as constituted as both an object and as a temporal process. Second, with Derrida and Merleau-Ponty, I posited sound as both an agent of closure and of immanent openness. In this alloyed Spinozistic/ Deleuzian perspective, sound is constituted through movement, but this movement is subject to constant transformation. Perhaps more importantly, sound’s movement is a site of expressive potential, not an end unto itself. And while activity and passivity have an important role to play in Spinoza’s epistemology and his ethics, sonic materiality as such does not produce these effects. Instead, like all other simple and composite bodies, Spinozistic sonic materiality places productive and transformative constraints on a listener’s constitutive ratio of

327

Deleuze and Guatarri, 343. 188

motion to rest, modulating her expressive capacities. As I explain in the next chapter, these productive constraints become a site for tactical and ethical work on the body and mind. Whether or not sound opens or closes us against other is simply not the right question to ask of Spinozistic sonic materiality. The question, instead, is what do we do to maximize our substantial unity with that materiality. However, Deleuze and Guatarri’s translation of Western music history into the register of expression is just not as exciting as all this – and it has nothing of this ethical urgency. They offer neither a newly periodized history nor new insight into the topoi associated with its traditional periodization. Deleuze and Guattari’s Classical era is associated with form, order and hierarchy, for example, while their Romantic era is tied to organicism, heroism and populism. Mozart demonstrates that sound can be rendered consistent and coherent as “a succession of forms that are compartmentalized, centralized and hierarchized in relationship to one another.”328 Romantic composers cede the Classical claim to formal expression, referring it instead to nature, the nation or the human being as such. They compel formed sound to become expressive of the Earth, for example, in Mahler – or the Crowd, the case of Mussorgsky – or the People, in the case of Verdi. Music historical periods retain their normative aesthetic features and those features are rendered forth through expressive actualization. An explicitly expressive formulation of these compositional efforts might go something like this. Sound has an immanent relation to creative forces. Musical 328

Ibid., 338. 189

composition formalizes consistent relations between sonic material, thus empowering a new composite sonic body to express some specific domain of those forces. Music instantiates that force in sound. So, let’s say we want to try and think of the opening “Promenade” from Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, through a musicallyspecific version of Deleuze and Macherey’s expressive triad. By so doing, we replace the notion that the “Promenade” depicts Mussorgsky’s experience with the notion that the “Promenade” sonorizes Mussorgsky’s experience of walking through an exhibition of his friend’s paintings and drawings. Sound makes that mental and bodily experience a thinkable reality through a conjunction of musically intelligible consistency relations: assymetrical and mixed meters, diatonic harmony, simple division of the beat and minimal registral contrasts. On this read, “Promenade” doesn’t use sound as a representational medium in order to duplicate Mussorgsky’s original experience. Instead, this expressive reading of “Promenade” simply treats the work as the constitution of experience in sound. Matter’s expressivity constitutes artworks as new realities, not as new representations of how life is.329 Deleuze and Guatarri don’t rethink what music does as a consequence of matter’s expressivity – rather, they rethink how it does what it is normatively assumed to do. They ignore the complex network of materialities that comprise musical production and circulation: performing and listening bodies, instruments, acoustic spaces, recording devices and material documents of live and recorded musical sound.

329

Peter Hallward. Out of the World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation. London: Verso, 2006, 107. 190

Precisely because, for Spinoza, these materialities are all modes of a single substance, it is in this thoroughly “thingly” understanding of musical material that a Spinozistic interpretive strategy might be most interesting. Why? Once we have sidelined the antiCartesian obligation to produce the body as an agent of opposition with respect to the mind, we shed a fully anthropocentric view of musical production. Acknowledging that expression is a consequence of a decentralized interaction between materialities (or “bodies,” as Spinoza might say), we might begin to locate the production of embodied knowledge – and a progressive ethics – within broader material networks.

3.6 Expressive Materialities and Drastic Knowledge

The question of what a body can do appears in nearly every register throughout the course of the Ethics. It induces a non-Cartesian refiguration of the mind-body union, it frames sense perception as a tactical medium for empowering thought, and it motivates matter’s expressivity more generally. So, as I’ve been asking throughout this project, what exactly do we invest in when we prioritize the body in music studies? A Spinozistic investiture in the body might commit to the implications of refusing, in advance, to assume what the body can do. In her commitment to the drastic, Abbate seems to want something similar. Hermeneutics, she implies, should not foreclose on the drastic’s myriad affective manifestations. As she enumerates, those affects can be devastating, physically brutal, mysterious, erotic and

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embarrassing.330 And yet, her rigidly dualist thinking creates oppositions where a different mode of reading might propose expressive relationships. Abbate is committed to the notion that the drastic and Gnostic are qualitatively opposed. Their opposition founds an ethical injunction aimed at preventing hermeneutic reading from prescribing the meaning of music and the bodies that produce it. Hermeneutic interpretation tethers music to meaning, for Abbate, all the while disavowing or sidelining music’s bodily origins. Like other anti-Cartesian polemics, Abbate’s ethics of the drastic protect the performing body as such. And yet, though Abbate is in the business of explicating what is so special about live performance, her polemical categories actually produce an extremely limited view of what the body and the mind can do in the face of musical sound. Here is one of Abbate’s most impassioned accounts of what is so hard to explain about performance. Whatever its vague outer limits, [performance] has a dense center that has to do with musical performance’s strangeness, its unearthly as well as its earthly qualities, and its resemblance to magic shows and circuses. Because instrumental virtuosity or operatic singing, like magic itself, can appear to be the accomplishment of the impossible, performers at that level appear superhuman to their audiences and inspire worship or hysteria. Yet musical performance challenges notions of autonomy by staging the performers’ servitude, even 330

Carolyn Abbate. “Music: Drastic or Gnostic?” Critical Inquiry. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Vol. 30, No. 3 (Spring, 2004): 505-536, 517-518. 192

automatism and upends assumptions about human subjectivity by invoking

mechanism:

human

bodies

wired

to

notational

prescriptions.331 Abbate describes virtuosic striving as co-extensive, here, with conformity and control. Musical performance showcases superhuman specialization, while at the same time effacing the body’s autonomy. Abbate laments the fact that all this gets discussed “as if it were an unremarkable fact of civilized life.”332 This constitutes an unethical forgetting of the bodily risk that attends musical performance. But what if the delicate balance between agency and automatism is an unremarkable fact? In a Spinozistic world, our lived projects (be they corporeal, intellectual, ethical or political) are part of a mutually affective network of material that we can never transcend. At the same time, Spinoza develops his ethics, which I’ll explore in greater depth in the next chapter, by instructing us in how to cultivate an active orientation toward our necessary and immanent relationship to that world. As Garrett puts it, this may take the form of “direct participation in the divine” which expresses substance’s constitutive power. Not only, for Spinoza, is there no assumption that subjectivity entails autonomy, but knowledge about how our capacities are determined and circumscribed becomes a source of ethical joy. This Spinozistic reading implies two interventions in Abbate’s position. First, either musical performance may not be qualitatively but quantitatively different from 331 332

Abbate, 508. Ibid., 508. 193

other embodied experiences. And second, the drastic is not unique to musical experience. Both have rich and complex ethical implications, which the next chapter explores. For now, however, I turn to a counterpoint to Abbate’s opposition of the magical to the machinic.

Jankélévitch offers a reading of the performer’s

relationship to the instrument that accesses a much more productive aspect of its attenuation of the performer’s agency. So, too, the sounding material does not simply tag along the human mind and it is not just something at the disposal of our whims. It is recalcitrant. Sometimes it refuses to take us where we would like to go; better still, this instrument which is often an obstacle, take us somewhere else, ushers us into the presence of beauty not foreseen…Far from being amenable to the winds of our desires, this servant of intention will make us its own master. The material is neither a docile instrument, nor a pure obstacle.”333 Without a doubt, lyrical passages like this one support Abbate’s claim that there is something magical about musical performance. But the relationship that Jankélévitch describes here is also productive and expressive. The instrument is constituted by unique capacity to affect and be affected by other things. It is neither transparent and docile, nor is it purely prohibitive. Thus, the player and instrument encounter one another as “molecularized things.” Both instrument and player bring disparate but 333

Vladimir Jankélévitch. Trans. Carolyn Abbate. Music and the Ineffable. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003, 28. 194

unique capacities to this encounter. As they mutually negotiate a path to consistency, they begin to express a mutually-compatible capacity that, in Jankélévitch’s words might “usher us into the presence of beauty not yet foreseen.” Observing the instrument’s recalcitrance means admitting, in other words, that we do not know in advance what the bodies of the player and the instrument can do. Although Jankélévitch’s lyrical invocation of beauty is not germane to Spinoza, Deleuze or Descartes, it does express an important aspect of what I want to say about bodies. Abbate places the performing body at the impossible threshold between the “magical” and the “machinic.” Notional prescriptions attenuate the performer’s agency as her superhuman abilities demonstrate the scores’ inadequacy. My Spinozistic reading of Jankélévitch (and, by proxy, Abbate) turns this threshold into a site of expressive possibility. If we think of the performing body and the score as what Deleuze and Guattari call “matters of expression,” then performance becomes a negotiation between two mutually-affective, yet recalcitrant materialities. The performance, itself, becomes expressive of the dynamic interaction (and possible consolidation) of the demands of the instrument, the score, the space or the audience. If the performer thereby seems to accomplish the impossible, it is perhaps because this negotiation may yield capacities that well exceed our assumptions of what a body can do.

3.7 The Challenge of Instrumentalization

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Although Descartes replaces a cosmological conception of universal harmony with a material conception of music as sound, musical experience remains for him far too subjective to form a foundation for any political, ethical or moral activity. Spinoza’s related uncoupling of music from the cosmos, however, bears a polemical edge and an ethical objective: to reconnect human subjects to their determination within a substantially unified material world over and against an anthropomorphic God and the delusion of human mastery and privilege it supports. Under this logic, as I have shown through my discussion of Abbate and Jankélévitch, the constraints that seem to make musical performance so interesting form the conditions of possibility for all lived projects in a substantially unified world. In his polemically titled article, “Why Spinoza has No Aesthetics,” philosopher James Morrison offers a critique of Spinoza’s treatment of art that illustrates these implications surprisingly well, even as Morrison’s conclusions rest on some basic misunderstandings of how Spinozistic subjects interact with material things. First, Morrison asserts that artistic production “[does] not constitute a special domain of activity” in Spinoza’s thought.334 And second, he claims that the arts have instrumental, but not intrinsic value for Spinoza. Morrison’s first theses underscores Spinoza’s refusal to drawn a principled line separating “special” artistic activities from other forms of bodily expenditure. Now, Morrison is not wrong on either account. Art cannot have an a priori value in Spinoza’s thought precisely because the value of any 334

James C. Morrison. “Why Spinoza Has No Aesthetics.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. Vol. 47, No. 4 (Autumn, 1989), pp. 359-365, 360. 196

activity is immanent to the kind of knowledge and bodily action it promotes – it’s not reducible to the content of the activity as such. As I explain in the next chapter, I see this as a site of rich possibility. Morrison’s charge of instrumentality misunderstands the way that we interact with materialities on Spinoza’s view. Matter is mutually affective and thus transformative in all directions. Through their very materiality, artworks present an occasion for tactical work upon the senses which, in parallel fashion, animates new mental powers. This is a consequence of transformative interactivity, not exploitative use. In order to support his charge of instrumentalization, Morrison draws on one of Spinoza’s rare engagements with music, nested in Part IV of the Ethics. In the Scholium of IVP45, Spinoza enumerates a number of experiences from which we can reliably derive joy – the passion by which the mind passes to a greater perfection.335 Spinoza surprisingly offers laughter and joking as examples of pure joy, cautioning us, of course, not to indulge in their pleasures to excess. Spinoza then adds many other shared experiences of aesthetic engagement, bodily activity and conviviality to these joyful experiences. He writes, It is the part of a wise man, I say, to refresh and restore himself in moderation and pleasant food and drink, sport, with scents, with the beauty of green plants, with decoration, music, sports, the theater and other things of this kind, which anyone can use without injury to

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Ethics, III, P11, Scholium 197

another. For the human body is composed of a great many parts of different natures which constantly require new and varied nourishment, so that the whole body may be equally capable of all the things that follow from its nature, and hence, so that the mind also may be equally capable of understanding many things at once.336 The Spinozistic sage doesn’t so much “use” music and the other experiences listed here as he enfolds them into extant knowledge about the body. The human body needs many other bodies for its nourishment and regeneration, and these activities fulfill that need in very specific ways. And, like reason itself, this drive toward regeneration is simultaneously an impulse toward sociality. Bodily regeneration, in other words, is here projected onto the domain of the social. Spinoza proposes conviviality, spectatorship, laughter, listening and competition as forms of sociability in which the empowerment of minds and bodies can be shared. 3.8 Conclusions and New Questions Through Spinoza’s theory of materiality (and Morrison’s critique of its implication for aesthetics), I have proposed that musical embodiment can no longer be understood as a special category of experience. While this position releases the body from its antiCartesian obligation to oppose the mind, it also raises a number of questions. 1. If investing in the Spinozistic body means investing in not knowing what it can

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Ethics, IV, P45, Scholium. 198

do, how does the care and regeneration of the body become a social project, for Spinoza? 2. And, in contrast to Descartes (and Viet Erlmann’s imprecise conjugation of his social thought) how does Spinoza’s understanding of the mind-body union subtend his understanding of social and ethical life? Before opening these questions in the next chapter, a few words about the substance of Spinoza. Even though music studies hasn’t actually followed her genealogical trajectory with respect to bodily substantiality, Elizabeth Povinelli warns scholars interested in bodies and embodied practice to remain wary of theories of substance. While Spinoza’s “substance under the attribute of extension” undoubtedly draws our attention toward the body’s basis in matter, his immanent understanding of what the body can do proposes the body as a site of ethical and social work. When he says that “bodies are distinguished not by substance but by reason of motion and rest,” he explicitly rejects a substantial reduction of the embodied subject. That is, the capacities of Spinozistic bodies are not reducible to a hard-and-fast substantial identity. Precisely because they are identified by what they can do, Spinozistic bodies are also identified by the interventions they can make upon their own abilities with respect to greater refinement and specialization. Next, I explore the sociality of this project and it parallel constitution in thought.

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Chapter Four “A Visceral Attachment to Life:” Rational Joy and the Ethics of Musical Bodies

4.0 Introduction, or, Expressive Ears

In order to make my way into the questions with which Chapter 3 closes, I first want to examine another compelling event of musical expressivity: Maryanne Amacher’s (1938-2009) Third Ear Music. We’ve encountered the third ear through Derrida, Nietzsche and Theodor Reik: at once a psychoanalytic and feminine way of “hearing” veiled intentions, affective secrets and unacknowledged wishes encrypted within paralinguistic sound. Amacher’s third ear, on the other hand, liquidates the distinction between content and materiality that underpins these positions. By so doing, she challenges the allocation of affect, materiality and para-rational thinking to the feminine while intimating a wide-reaching rejection of divisions between man/mind/politics/discourse and woman/body/affect/nature.337 Amacher accomplishes

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Sarah Donovan. “Re-reading Irigaray’s Spinoza.” In Feminist Interpretations of Benedict Spinoza. Ed. Moira Gatens. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009, 179. For a feminist deconstructive view of the Nietzschean third ear, see the work of Sarah Kofman, in particular: Sarah Kofman and Madeleine Dobie. “The Psychologist of the Eternal Feminine (Why I Write Such Good Books, 5) Yale French Studies. No. 87: Another Look, Another Woman: Retranslations of French Feminism. (1996): pp. 173-189.; Sarah Kofman and Francoise Lionnet-McCumber. “Nietzsche and the Obscurity of Heraclitus.” In Diacritics. Vol. 17, No. 3. (Autumn, 1987): 3955.

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this work, not through a Derridean-Nietzschean interpretative practice, but instead through a Deleuzian-Spinozistic expressive process. Published on a 1999 Tzadik release alongside a set of site-specific compositions, Amacher’s third ear music mobilizes the psychoacoustic phenomena of “otoacoustic emission” to produce sounds that originate within the listener’s ear. The piece is made of rapidly oscillating patterns of high-register sine tone articulated by sharp, clear attacks. The effect is something like a highly-amplified and accelerated music box, or, as Amacher herself lightheartedly describes ! like an “ice cream man.”338 Applied to the cochlea in short bursts, the pure sine tones provoke the cochlea and cilia to amplify the tones’ frequencies within the inner ear, creating the effect that the ear itself is producing sound. In my experience listening to, reflecting upon and teaching Amacher’s third ear music, otoacoustic sounds begin within the ear as a slight vibrational presence; an itch, or a sense that the temperature within the ear has somehow risen. The gradual increase in intensity eventually presents itself as pitch, once I’ve acclimated to the harsh register and timbre of the sine tones. By way of guiding the listener through this process, she writes, When played at the right sound level, which is quite high and excited, the tones in the music will cause your ears to act as neurophonic instruments that emit sounds that will seem to be issuing directly from

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Maryanne Amacher. “Head Rhythm 1” and “Plaything 2.” Sound Characters: Making the Third Ear. New York: Tzadik, 1999.

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your head. In concert, my audiences discover music streaming out from their head, popping out of their ears… and converging with the sound in the room…[.] These virtual tones are a natural and very real physical aspect of auditory perception, similar to the fusing of two images resulting in a third three- dimensional image in binocular perception. Produced interaurally, these virtual sounds and melodic patterns originate in ears and neuroanatomy…I believe such responses exist in all music, where they are registered subliminally and are certainly masked within more complex timbres. I want to release this music which is produced by the listener, bring it out of subliminal existence, make it an important sonic dimension of my music.339 The “molecularized matter” that Amacher uses in this expressive effort is simple: sine tones, amplification, the inner ear, a room. The ear’s propensity to produce sound remains latent until the sine tones make it a sensible reality; Amacher coaxes the inner ear to express this always-extant (if rarely noticed) sonorous capacity. Her third ear doesn’t render forth interpretive secrets, but instead reveals a substantial unity between her music and her listener that emerges through the ear’s newly expressive sonorousness. While Derrida ensnares the inner ear between a logocentric erasure of difference and an ineluctable susceptibility to constituted power, Amacher posits the ear as a site 339

Maryanne Amacher. Liner notes “Sound Characters for Third Ear Music.” Sound Characters: Making the Third Ear. New York: Tzadik, 1999. 202

of expressive and thoroughly material experimentation. This transformation revises the allocation of activity to the eye (and mind), and passivity to the ear (and the body), thus mirroring Spinoza’s refiguration of activity and passivity as ethical and epistemological categories. All things, in a Spinozistic world, are animated by a constitutive striving to persist in existence. Spinoza uses (but redefines) the Hobbesian term conatus to describe this striving.340 The Spinozistic conatus describes an “irrepressible and tenacious hold on life” that inhabits “the whole of nature”; our consciousness of this striving, Spinoza explains, is called desire.341 This desire is constitutive of life. By, at last, bringing Spinoza’s conception of the mind-body union into sharp focus, this chapter examines how expressive events like the production of Amacher’s third ear constitute an immanently social form of knowledge. This chapter unsettles a collection of normative oppositions that structure many of music studies’ antiCartesian polemics: activity/passivity, analytic knowledge/embodied knowledge, meaning/performing, Gnostic/drastic, reason/affect. Treating these oppositions as expressive networks that, like the mind-body problem itself, aggregate complex and 340

As Susan James explains, “the whole of nature exhibits this striving, which constitutes the essence of the whole and each of its parts, so that everything possesses some power to maintain itself and resist destruction.” Susan James. Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy. Oxford: Clarendon, 1999, 146. 341 James, 146. Lloyd offers a slightly more limited definition of the conatus by aligning it with ratios of motion to rest. Genevieve Lloyd. Part of Nature: Self Knowledge in Spinoza’s Ethics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994, 15. Spinoza defines desire and consciousness of conative striving in IIIP145.

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diverse critical milieu, I will unpack them through examining musical and analytic practices that explicitly foreground their relation to the body. Reading what would, in an anti-Cartesian perspective, an oppositional (because bodily) practice through Spinoza’s theory of knowledge, I propose what Spinoza calls common notions as tools for reconstituting bodily exemplarity as expressive knowledge. Precisely because Spinozistic knowledge is thoroughly bodily, the anti-Cartesian category of “embodied knowledge” becomes neither a special way of knowing, nor a form of politicized opposition. While Spinoza’s resolution of dualism effaces this expedient oppositionality, his ethics open music to a broader view of the social constitution of its complex materialities.

4.1 The Mind-Body Union Making a commitment to rethinking what a body can do in a Spinozistic way precipitates a parallel rethinking of the mind’s capacities. Spinoza’s monist reconstitution of the mind-body union shifts focus from what I have been calling “embodied knowledge” – a way of grasping the production of music’s meaning through listening and performance – to the body’s active role in the production of what Spinoza call ideas. As Spinoza explains, “by idea I understand a concept of mind which the mind forms because it is a thinking thing,” and goes on the elaborate that, “I say concept rather than perception because the word perception seems to indicate that the mind is acted on by an object. But concept seems to express an action of the

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mind.”342 Here, Spinoza makes two powerful moves against Descartes. First, by theorizing ideas as actions of thought, he effectively rejects Descartes’ imagistic conception of thought. Ideational actions, for Spinoza, are expressive and productive. Second, by counting sensation amongst such actions, Spinoza dissolves the Cartesian allocation of passivity to the senses and activity to the mind. So, how does this notion of the mind’s constitution in and through ideational actions correspond to bodies? Like all other modes of substance, the Spinozistic human being is “one and the same thing, now conceived under the attribute of thought, now conceived under the attribute of extension.”343 “Mind” and “body” are equivalent viewpoints on one and the same unified thing, and thus, like the attributes, the human mind and human body are insolubly united from the perspective of substance. While Descartes’ method of doubt grounds the mind within thought via the cogito, Spinoza posits the mind as an expressive affirmation of an existent thing. He writes, “the first thing which constitutes the actual being of a human mind is nothing but the singular idea of something that actually exists.”344 As the “idea” of something that actually exists, the mind simply is its productive action. So, what the source of this constitutive action? The thing that comes to constitute the actual being of the human mind is none other than the human body. In Spinoza’s

342

Ethics, II, D3. Ethics, II P7, Scholium; III P2, Demonstration. 344 Ethics, II, P11. 343

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own words, “the object of the idea constituting the human mind is the body, or a certain mode of extension which actually exists.”345 Spinoza unpacks this claim over the course of two important propositions that precede the Physical Digression. Whatever happens in the object of any idea constituting the human mind must be perceived by the human mind, or there will necessarily be an idea of that thing in the mind; that is, if the object constituting the human mind is a body, nothing can happen in that body that which is not immediately perceived by the mind.346 Although Descartes claims to feel events within his body as though his mind was dispersed throughout the entirety of its materiality, we know this is an illusion – a heuristic cover-up, of sorts, for dualism’s problematic account of mind-body interaction. Spinoza replaces Cartesian interaction with a new formula: parallelism.347 Deleuze inflects parallelism in two different ways. One the one hand, what Deleuze calls ontological parallelism guarantees the Spinozistic mind-body union because “modes under all the attributes form one and the same modification.”348 On the other,

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Ethics, II P13. Ethics, II, P12. 347 This is not a term Spinoza himself uses, although it is crucial to Deleuze and Della Rocca’s accounts of Spinoza’s epistemology and theory of the mind-body union. Leibniz’s conception of pre-established harmony figures as a “paralellist” view of mind and matter insofar as it denies interaction between the two realms. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dualism/#Par Accessed 7/20/ 2011. 348 Gilles Deleuze. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. Trans. Robert Hurley. San Francisco: City Lights, 1988, 88. 346

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Deleuze identifies an epistemological parallelism that traces the production of ideas to their constitution in substance – that is, every idea corresponds immediately to an object or action upon the body.349 “An idea in thought,” Deleuze writes, “and its object in a different attribute form one and the same individual.”350 Spinoza replaces Descartes’ incoherent mind-body interactivity with the simultaneous concurrence of epistemological parallelism. Spinoza’s understanding of the mind-body union simultaneously radicalizes, neutralizes and unsettles the category of embodied knowledge. The parallel relation of Spinozistic minds and bodies yields a strange counterintuitive wager: the mind and body do not interact. Interaction between material things is mirrored by interaction between ideas from the perspective of the attributes, but there is no causality across attributes. Ideas simply are the action and affections of the body conceived under the attribute of thought. Indeed, as Genevieve Lloyd explains, Spinozistic “knowledge, begins as the sensory awareness of the body” precisely because the mind is the idea of sensory modifications within the body.351 While music studies has drawn many principled lines in the name of what does and does not count as embodied knowledge (drastic/Gnostic, analysis/performance) Spinoza’s thought proposes that all knowledge is “embodied knowledge” insofar as all of our ideas have a bodily correlate and vice versa. This constitutive embodiment becomes the means, or “material” in and through

349

Ibid., 88. Ibid., 89. 351 Lloyd, 20. 350

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which Spinozistic subjects pursue greater intellectual capacity; it is not, in other words, a political or moral victory against a controlling or transcendent “mind.” The body’s constitutive relation to the mind posits the body as a site of what political theorist William E. Connolly calls tactical work – the cultivation of experimental practices on the body that, in parallel fashion, expand the capacity of the mind’s expressive actions.352 Musical practice is unequivocally such a tactics – or what Elizabeth Povinelli elsewhere calls a “radical pragmatics of the body.”353 As Spinoza continually reminds us, like a refrain sounding throughout the Ethics: the mind becomes more powerful in its capacity to think the more the body is capable of doing “a great many things.” Power, in Spinoza’s thought, can be interpreted in two ways. First, as potentia, meaning potential, capacity or ability. And second, as potestas, which means power over others in the manner of the sovereign. The injunction to “a great many things” is an injunction to potentia – that is, to tactical refinement of our constitutive ratio of motion to rest. Training the limbs (in the manner of Elizabeth LeGuin), attuning the ear to the “grain” of singing and performing bodies (in the manner of Roland Barthes), or tracking the bodies’ impulse to move in synchrony with rhythmic impetus (in the manner of Naomi Cumming) all constitute a differently localized tactics of the body that redistribute ideational capacities in parallel fashion. 352

William E. Connolly. Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002, 104. 353 Elizabeth Povinelli. Empire of Love: Toward a Theory of Intimacy Genealogy and Carnality. Durham: Duke University Press: 2006, 7.

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As I remarked in Chapter 1, Suzanne Cusick’s “Feminist Theory/Music Theory” (1994) seems to have had lasting power in research on substantial bodies, and I think this is due, in part, to how well her musical examples explicate the irreducibility of performers’ knowledge of musical works.354 Her experience playing Bach’s “Aus tiefer Not” (Clavierubung, Part III, PWV 686) at the organ drives a particularly powerful wedge between analytic and embodied approaches to musical “meaning,” Cusick’s primary analytic category. In this case, the work’s meaning rests in its how it conveys the Lutheran posture of grace. The logic is dualistic; on one hand, grace appears as a “dance-like bass,” which is both audible and analyzable and, on the other, grace appears through the score’s inaudible demands on the performer. Holding fast to her programmatic opposition of embodied knowledge to analysis, Cusick allocates the first form of grace to the listening/analyzing mind, the second to the performing body; in the first case, the listener registers this lithe bass, but in the second, the performer faces complex technical challenges. Dramatizing the disparity between listening and performing, she writes, “for these terrifying moments, one might as well be floating in mid air, so confused and shifting is the body’s center of gravity” – and yet, “neither harmonic, not contrapuntal analysis would identify this little passage as critical to the work’s meaning.”355 Subordinating

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Tracy McMullen. “Corpo-Realities: Keepin' It Real in ‘Music and Embodiment’ Scholarship.” Current Musicology. (Fall 2006): 61-83; Paul Sanden. “Hearing Glenn Gould's Body: Corporeal Liveness in Recorded Music.” Current Musicology. (Fall 2009): 7-36. 355 Suzanne Cusick. “Feminist Theory, Music Theory and the Mind/Body Problem.” Perspective of New Music. Vol. 32, No. 1 Winter 1994): 8-27, 18. 209

the performer to the “work’s meaning” reinforces dualism’s now-familiar economy of suffering; that is, the organist suffers for the work’s audible integrity. Acknowledging an immanent correlation of ideas and bodily actions, a Spinozistic translation of this problem would posit any mental act of “co-composition” as the ideational correlate of a necessarily embodied listening. This listener then becomes part of a broad and complex expressive network that also encompasses the performing body, the organ’s materiality and the score’s demands. If “Aus tiefer Not” is, in part concerned with sonorizing Lutheran grace, then its demands upon the performing body become a tactics of grace, not a secret (and because secret, subjugated) meaning of the work. The audible grace to which Cusick opposes her performance also proffers such a tactics but with a different productive force and intensity. My tactical reading moves the performer’s bodily effort to the very center of “Aus tiefer Not’s” expressive network, removing the dualistic vestige of secrecy, while (for now) leaving the question of meaning open. 4.2 What can a mind do? This notion of a “tactics of the body” may resonate with readers familiar with Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guatarri’s famous “How to Make Yourself a Body Without Organs” from A Thousand Plateaus.356 Like art, aimed at maximizing matter’s

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Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Trans. Brian Massumi. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

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expressive capacities, making yourself into a body without organs proposes the body and its systems as a site for radical experimentation in the form of hyperspecialization, disruption and subsequent re-systematization or controlled disorder. Extracted from the work of Antonin Artaud but inflected with the Spinozistic challenge to what a body can do, Deleuze’s “body without organs” seems to operate in isolation – almost in a posture of transcendence or autonomy. That is, this tactics loses touch with the immanent sociality of Spinozistic bodies. Moira Gatens emphasizes this point, asserting that “when the term embodiment is used in the context of Spinoza’s thought, it should be understood to refer not to simply an individual body, but to the total milieu of that body. The powers and actions of any particular body are inescapably relational on this view.”357 So, if the body’s capacities are relational in this way, the same holds for the mind it constitutes. Just as our bodies are immanently connected to the rest of Nature, so are our minds connected to what Spinoza calls, in the “Worm in the Blood” letter, Nature’s “infinite power of thinking.” Our minds are ideas in God’s infinite intellect, and the ideas we have are also “in” God insofar as he constitutes the infinite totality of thought.358 As Deleuze explains, “we don’t actually have the idea that we are, at least not immediately: it is in God insofar as he is affected with an infinity of other ideas.”359

357

Moira Gatens. “The Politics of the Imagination.” In Feminist Interpretations of Benedict Spinoza. Ed. Moira Gatens. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009, 201. 358 Lloyd, 19 . 359 Deleuze, 88. 211

While the mind can never assert sovereignty over the body (or the rest of Nature, for that matter) precisely because our minds are immanent to God’s infinite intellect, we can work to bring our ideas into alignment with their subsistence within the divine intellect. Because every idea is an idea of a state, action or affection of the body, all of our ideas affirm the body to some degree. So, while Descartes distinguishes between true and false ideas, Spinoza explicates the degree to which our ideas are inadequate or adequate to their constitution in God’s infinite intellect. Ideas are inadequate when they describe things only as they affect us, while adequate idea grasps things through their causes. Spinoza distributes this distinction across three “kinds” of knowledge. The first is based on uncultivated sense data and hearsay ! it is necessarily inadequate. The second is adequate and it entails reasoning from sound premises. It encompasses discursive knowledge, such as empirical science, mathematics, optics and music theory (although Spinoza doesn’t mention music theory as such). The third and highest kind of knowledge entails knowing things through their constitution in God.360 Insofar

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Because of my interest in the opposition of discursive knowledge to bodies in the music fields, this project focuses on Spinoza’s second kind of knowledge. The third kind of knowledge brings with it complex philosophical problems with Spinoza’s understanding of the mind-body union. That is, he posits that by achieving the third kind of knowledge, the mind becomes to some degree eternal after the death of the body. This position constitutes a very problematic break with Spinoza’s parallelism. Though I hope to engage the richly textured debates about why Spinoza may have made this claim in the future, here I discuss the aspects of Spinoza’s theory of knowledge that I think are most pertinent to music studies.

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as the second kind of knowledge produces Spinoza’s uniquely concentric amalgam of joy, activity and rationality, it creates the condition of possibility for our achievement of knowledge of third kind. Spinoza’s hierarchy of knowledge produces rationality as a project of becoming. As affirmations of the body, inadequate ideas are not dubitable in the manner of the oneiric and sensory scenarios that drive Descartes’ method of doubt. In Michael Della Rocca’s words, “…ideas may differ in degree of affirmation, but there are no differences between ideas that are affirmed and ideas that are not.”361 Inadequate ideas are nothing more or less than weak affirmations subject to revision by ideational actions of greater power. Although some affirmations are clearer than others, the Spinozistic body is never flagrantly deceitful the way the Cartesian body is. Rather, inadequate and adequate ideas articulate a distinction between passivity and activity within the Spinozistic subject. We have inadequate ideas to the extent that we understand neither how our actions are determined nor how things are determined to act upon us. Adequate ideas, on the other hand, match “the system of ideas in [the] infinite intellect that constitutes knowledge of those objects according to the order to their causes.”362 These ideas emerge through our active pursuit of individuals that empower our capacity to think and act – and what’s more, they produce ideas of their own adequacy. Ideas and affirmation of their adequacy arrive together, they reinforce 361 362

Michael Della Rocca. Spinoza. New York: Routledge, 2008, 126. Wilson, 105.

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one another and they are inextricable.363 “He who has an adequate idea,” Spinoza writes, “must at the same time have an adequate idea, or true knowledge, of his own knowledge.” Once the ideas we have in our mind become equal to their standing in God’s, the adequacy of those ideas is reflected back to us as adequate ideas of our own knowledge And yet, because the mind is constituted by the body, it never takes an evaluative stance on the body on the manner of Descartes’ cogito. Rather, because the body is thoroughly imbricated in the transformative movement immanent to matter, we only know our body through its actions and affections. Thus, Spinoza tells us that “the human mind does not know the human body itself, nor does it know that it exists except through ideas of affections by which the body is affected.”364 As Margaret explicates, “our knowledge of our bodies is predicated on our knowledge of the effect produced in our body by external things.”365 So, we don’t actually have unmediated access to the body; we know our body through its interaction with the rest of matter and its complex projects of tactical refinement. In the “Worm in the Blood” letter,

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Spinoza uses a paradigmatic and concrete mathematic example to illustrate this position: “Let us conceive some singular volition, say a mode of thinking by which the mind affirms that the three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles. The affirmation involves the concept or idea of the triangle, that is, it cannot be conceived without the idea of the triangle.” (Ethics II, P49) Here, Spinoza explains that the action of affirming that something is true is one and the same thing as the true idea itself. Just as our affirmation of adequate knowledge of the triangle entails the idea of the triangle, Spinoza elaborates, so does the very idea of the triangle produce a simultaneous affirmation of its geometrical properties. 364 Ethics, II, P19. 365 Wilson, 105. 214

Spinoza reminds us that our body requires a great many bodies “by which, as it were, [it is] continually regenerated.”366 External bodies mediate our understanding of our bodies even as they articulate our own body’s life-sustaining connection to the world. Spinoza’s theory of knowledge turns on how well we understand the infinite expanse of materiality of which we are a part. Put slightly differently, grasping matter’s mutual affectivity grounds the production of ideas in Spinoza’s epistemology. Here, Spinoza explain the transition from passivity to activity that transforms inadequate to adequate ideas vis-à-vis other bodies. I say expressly that the mind has not an adequate, but only a confused knowledge of its own body and of external bodies so long as it perceives things from the common order of nature, that is, so long as it is determined externally from fortuitous encounters with things, to regard this or that and not so long as it is determined internally from the facts that it regards a number of things at once to understand their agreements, differences and oppositions. For so often, as it is disposed internally in this or another way, then it regards things clearly and distinctly…367

366 367

II, P19, Demonstration. Ethics, II, P29, Scholium.

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For Descartes, sense perception begins with a mechanical stimulus in the body and ends in a mental image – what Spinoza calls “a mute picture on a panel” – that is substantially separated from the body. Because perception is a mental activity, as Descartes explains in the Second Replies, the mechanical forces that thereby act upon the body have no share in its operation. In contrast, Spinozistic subjects seek an account for the material affectivity that constitutes “agreements, difference and oppositions” between bodies – that is, the complex interaction between bodies’ constitutive conative strivings. We are active to the extent that we understand the causes of what affects us and passive to the degree that we regard the things we undergo as “fortuitous encounters.” Passive judgments about the world are like premise-less conclusions in the human mind that “contrast with their status in the divine mind, where they are understood in relation to their full causal history, and according to ‘Nature’s order.’”368 Passivity and immersion, a consequence of the ear’s consummate openness, offer ready-made explications for music’s effects on bodies, as the work of McClary, Cumming and Dyson demonstrates, each with slightly different inflections. Similarly, for Derrida and his cohort, the open ear becomes a fraught site for the negotiation of otherness and self-relatedness. Spinoza’s univocal conception of activity and passivity unsettles the historically normative allocation of passivity to the ear in both musical and ethical domains. The Spinozistic body does not arrive, a priori, with zones of

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Wilson, 106. 216

activity or passivity distributed across its materiality. In Susan James’ words, passive and active affects “cater to the whole individual” – these affects express themselves univocally through the unified subject. 369 Spinoza’s anti-Cartesian refusal to model thought upon vision abrades the resultant association of vision with agency and activity and sound with passivity, immersion and dispersal. Rather, for Spinoza, the distinction between activity and passivity becomes a matter of perspective and a matter of practice. Activity entails attention to complex systems and milieus, while passivity rests in unconsidered assumptions about how things affect us. Like the body itself, music and sound ground an ethical provocation to cultivate precisely this internal determination toward their rich network of expressive materialities. In this sense, Amacher’s third ear music is stunning in its tactical passage from passive listening to active sonorousness. The ear’s constitutive openness with respect to Amacher’s sine tones grounds the active production of sound within the inner ear. Interaural sound recasts and thus reconfigures the “agreements, differences and oppositions” between sound and the listening body, positing the once-passive ear as a site of sonic production. As Lloyd explains, Spinozistic knowledge “is not direct attention to an intellectual object – there to be known, independent of awareness of the body. It is, rather, a refining of the direct sensory awareness of the body.”370 Amacher’s third ear music constitutes such a refinement, sensitizing subjects to the

369 370

James, 152. Lloyd, 18. 217

inner ear’s sonorous capacities. But there is more at stake here than just reflective refinement. Drawing on the body’s immanent imbrication with other bodies, Gatens asserts, “when Spinoza says that the mind is the idea of the body, the body is always already in a social context, and the context in which a body grows makes a real difference to the power and capacities of the individual it becomes.”371 The body’s capacities document its social history, while at the same time grounding the subject’s capacity to pursue transformative activities and ideas. While this position echoes a McClarian or Barthesian allocation of social power to the body, the Spinozistic body’s transformative potentia is not necessarily oppositional and never anthropocentric. Rather, just as Stuart Hampshire suggested that, for Spinoza “unity” and “difference” become a matter of perspective, so do “determination” and “transformation.” 4.3 Common Notions In Spinoza’s hierarchy of adequate ideas, the more we understand ourselves through what we share in common with others the more likely we are to differ from ourselves through the expressive actualization of previously unthought capacities. We gain adequate knowledge of a milieu by grasping “those things which are common to all, and which are equally in the part and the whole.”372 By so doing, we achieve what

371

Moira Gatens. In Interview with Susan James and Genevieve Lloyd. “The Power of Spinoza: Feminist Conjunctions.” In Hypathia. Vol 15. No. 2, Going Australian: Reconfiguring Feminism and Philosophy. (Spring 2000): 40-58, 46. 372 Ethics, II, P38. 218

Spinoza calls the common notions, adequate knowledge of the second kind that forms “the foundations of our reasoning.”373 As Deleuze explains, “the common notions are so named not because they are common to all minds, but because they are common to bodies, either all bodies (extension, motion and rest) or to some bodies (mine and another).”374 Gatens helpfully unpacks the common notions’ imbrication in bodily encounters. She writes, “common notions arise when one body encounters another with which it is compatible, and so experiences joy.”375 This encounter precipitates reflection on what constitutes compatibility amongst bodies, leading us to consider what bodies can and do share in common – through such consideration, we strive to understand the cause of that joy.376 Again, this refrain-like tactics of the body emerges with the question of what bodies share in common. “From this it follows,” Spinoza writes, “that the mind is more capable of perceiving a great many things adequately as its body has many things in common with other bodies.”377 “Joy” is translated from the Latin laetitia, implying happiness, delight or gladness without connoting motionless and stable contentment.378 While Barthesian or

373

Ethics, II, P40. Scholium. Deleuze, Practical Philosophy, 54. 375 Moira Gatens. “Introduction: Through Spinoza’s Looking Glass.” In Feminist Interpretations of Benedict Spinoza. Ed. Moira Gatens. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009, 7. 376 Ibid., 7. 377 Ethics, II, P39, Corollary. 378 Theresa Brennan emphasizes the personal historical dimension of Spinozistic affect. 374

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psychoanalytic jouissance instigate the particularly violent pleasure of shattering the ego’s imbrication in culture, Spinozistic joy projects itself both onto the social field and into the expressive capacities of the individual.379 This joy emerges through the increase of bodily and mental capacities associated with adequate ideas. Joy and sadness ground Spinoza’s theory of the affects, which are defined as “affections of the body by which the body’s power of acting is increased or diminished, aided or restrained and at the same time the idea of these affections.”380 With such an increase, Lloyd explains, “the affect of joy arising solely from the mind in adequate ideas gives rise to strength of character, tenacity – the desire by which we live from ‘the dictates of reason’ to preserve our being – and the desire by which we strive to aid others and join with them in friendship.”381 Joy’s production in and through desire, Jean-Luc Nancy points out, is restless and propulsive. Nancy writes, “joy is not appeasement – it is to be filled, overflowed…joy cannot contain itself and the joy of joying does not come back to anyone, neither to me nor to you, for in each it opens the other.”382 The

Our experience of affective states is always based on “how powerful we were in the past,” and thus they narrate a processual modulation of bodily and mental capacities. James, 146; Theresa Brennan. The Transmission of Affect. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004, 102. 379 Roland Barthes. Image-Music-Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977, 9. 380 Ethics, III, D3. Joy is “the passion by which the mind passes to a greater perfection,” and sadness “the passion by which it passes to a lesser perfection.” Ethics, III, P11. 381 Genevieve Lloyd. Spinoza and the Ethics. New York: Routledge, 1996, 78. 382 Jean-Luc Nancy. Trans. Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, Simona Sawhney. The Inoperative Community. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991, 107. 220

transmission of joy binds those who share it together, while observing, and, in a sense, articulating their singularity. Deleuze wagers a two-pronged definition of reason that explicates its imbrication in the production and circulation of joy. He writes, Reason is defined in two ways, which show that man is not born rational but also how he becomes rational. Reason is: 1. An effort to select and organize good encounters, that is, encounters of modes that enter into compositions with ours and inspire us with joyful passions (feelings that agree with reason); 2. The perception and comprehension of the common notions, that is, of the relations that enter in to this composition, from which one deduces other relations (reasoning) and on the basis of which ones experiences new feelings active ones, this time (feelings that are born of reason).383 In the first instance, reason compels us towards modes from which we derive joyful empowerment, while in the second instance, reason enables us grasp the commonalities that structure those relationships, thus empowering us to re-compose them. So, the common notions draw us toward systematic and discursive knowledge, but posit what Deleuze calls “reasoning” as the production of a joy that exceeds the single system from which it issues. In Connolly’s words, “for Spinoza, the source of

383

Deleuze, Practical Philosophy. 55-56. 221

existential joy accompanies enhanced knowledge of the deep structure of things.”384 And in Yirmiyahu Yovel’s words, this processual “enhancement” of that knowledge conceives reason as more a “more of being than of having, not something we possess, but something we are or become.”385 So, on Spinoza’s account, we mobilize the common notions in two ways. We grasp things through their shared properties and, consequently, we come to understand their causal history and our place in that history. By so doing, we develop a newly intensified understanding of our “bodily powers and the ways in which they are strengthened or impeded through those of other bodies.”386 Daniel Garber offers a nuanced example of the transition from inadequate to adequate knowledge. Suppose I am gazing at the Eiffel tower. The reflected light produces affections in my body. Now it is obvious that the ideas of those affections of my body constitute inadequate knowledge of the tower insofar as they are just ideas of a causal chain that includes the tower, and are not ideas of the tower itself. On the other hand, the idea of the

384

William E. Connolly. Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006, 104. 385 Yirmiyahu Yovel. The Marrano of Reason, Vol. 1, Spinoza and other Heretics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989. Cited in Moira Gatens. “Introduction: Through Spinoza’s Lookng Glass.” In Feminist Interpretations of Benedict Spinoza. Ed. Moira Gatens. University Park: University of Pennsylvania Press: 2009, 6. 386 Lloyd, 24. 222

tower in God’s mind includes the idea of the tower itself, and by IA4, all of its causes.387 Rather than view our own mind-body unit as the terminus for a causal chain that simply includes the tower, we should reposition ourselves in the network of relationships that explain the tower’s existence and the conditions under which we perceive it. We ought, for example, to explore the properties of light such that its reflection produces the affections that it does. We ought, also, to explore the interactions of motion to rest that brought the tower into existence with respect both bodily capacities and construction materials. By shifting our attention toward the tower itself and away from the tower’s affect on us, we can bring our idea of the tower closer to God’s. Margaret Wilson asserts that it might not exactly be reasonable for Spinoza to assert that “that every human being enjoys a direct (if implicit) insight into the nature and fundamental laws of material things.”388 While Wilson is probably right when it comes to whether not I mobilize the laws of optics every time I look out the window, expressive musical material may be another case entirely. As I’ve explained, Amacher’s sine tones produce insight onto otherwise unrecognized aspects of the

387

Ethics I, Axiom 4 tells us that “the knowledge of an effect depends on and involves knowledge of its cause.” Daniel Garber. “A Free Man Thinks of Nothing Less Than Death: Spinoza on the Eternity of Mind.” In Early Modern Philosophy: Mind, Matter and Metaphysics. Ed. Christina Mercer and Eileen O’Neill. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, 107. 388 Wilson, 116. 223

inner-ear’s material “nature.” Amacher’s expressive treatment of the inner ear intervenes on its alleged passivity and erasure of difference, showing the inner ear to share a “common” sonorousness with the sine tones that stimulate it. How might a similarly expressive treatment of speech exchange its association with identity and closure for something akin to Spinoza’s common notions and the joy they allegedly produce? In order to engage this question, I turn to another canonical work from the American experimentalist tradition: Alvin Lucier’s famous text piece “I am Sitting in a Room” for voice and electronics (1970). In this work, Lucier records himself reading a short text and then plays it back into the space in which it was recorded. He continues this record-playback cycle for fifteen iterations over the course of 23 minutes, although in performance the number of iterations may vary. The text he records functions as both a program note, a technical explication and personal testimony. Lucier’s recording documents a stutter in his speaking voice, which I imply below. I am s-sitting in a room, different than the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice, and I am going to play it back into the room again and again until the r-r-esonant frequencies of the room r-r-einforce themselves so that any semblance of my speech with perhaps the exception of r-r-rhythm is destroyed. What you will

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hear then are the-he natural r(h)esonant frequencies of the room articulates by speech. I regard this activity n-not so much as a demonstration of a natural fact but-t as more a way to s-s-smooth out any irregularities my speech might have.389 Lucier’s final statement casts “I am Sitting in a Room” as a personal project, aiming to “smooth” or in Roland Barthes’ words, patinate his speaking voice by eliminating the stutter from the first recorded iteration. If we take Lucier at his word here, the text’s many iterations narrate a processual passage from “imperfect” to smooth speech. The piece is open to a deconstructive critique based in the logic of autoaffection. That is, if “I am Sitting in a Room” constitutes a tactical of vocal perfectibility, then the work aims to suture Lucier to a more perfect version of his own voice. If, as Derrida explains, auto-affective speech disavows its subjection to spatial exteriority, Lucier seems to marshal that exteriority in order to incorporate it into a still more powerfully proprietary relationship with his own voice.390 The room’s capacity to perfect the voice becomes part of the closed circuit that constitutes what Derrida calls “living speech” – the ineluctable affirmation of voice as property of the speaking subject.391 In Derrida’s words, “Repetition idealizes itself. Here, idealization is the movement by which sensory exteriority, that which affects me or serves me as signifier, submits itself to my power of repetition to what thenceforward serves me as 389

My transcription. Jacques Derrida. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976, 166. 391 Ibid., 165. 390

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my spontaneity and escapes me less and less.”392 Through the fifteen iterations that constitute “I am Sitting in a Room,” Lucier re-appropriates speech through an idealized tactics of repetition. Like Amacher’s third ear music, Lucier’s work is open to compelling deconstructive readings. And yet, I adopt an expressive frame that turns on Lucier’s strange caveat that “I am Sitting in a Room” is not merely a “demonstration of a natural fact,” presenting (perhaps falsely) the “natural” reading as an inferior interpretation to one that prioritizes his tactics of voice. Treating the voice as a matter of expression, on the other hand, means sideling the anthropocentric and composercentric orientation of Lucier’s tactical claims. As one mode of “molecularized matter,” Lucier’s voice comes already invested with a unique frequency spectrum, a tendency to “catch” on certain consonant sounds, a particular repertoire of complexly mediated gestures and inflections. As another mode, the room comes already invested with a particular resonant frequency and echoic properties mediated, perhaps, by other objects or persons within it. The room’s sonorous capacity remains latent (or, better, silent) until activated by Lucier’s record-playback cycle, while, at the same time, the room extracts and amplifies precisely the vocal frequencies that render forth that latent sonorousness. Microphone, playback and recording constitute the “operations of consistency” by which the voice and the room delineate, express and amplify their sonorous conjunction. Far from disavowing spatial exteriority, Lucier allows that

392

Ibid., 166. 226

exteriority to reduce his voice to mere frequencies, and by so doing, maximize the expressive potentia of the room in which he is sitting. The reduction of the voice, or, its determination by spatial exteriority, provokes expressive differentiation. While Amacher’s third ear music proposes a material alternative to the ear’s intractable passivity, Lucier’s tactics of voice effaces the voice’s affiliation with identity and propriety by routing its sonorous potential through non-human materialities. Both works unsettle their topoi (listening and speech) by proposing oblique lines of flight connecting organic and inorganic things through shared features. Amacher reveals what the inner ear shares in common with the sine tones, Lucier reveals what his voice shares in common with the room in which he speaks. The “operations of consistency” that underlie these two events of musical expressivity unfold in the manner of Deleuze’s second definition of Spinozistic reason. That is, they grasp and systematize matter’s common features, rendering those common features thinkable and sensible. While Spinoza offers few examples of the second kind of knowledge, he makes clear that grasping bodies through their constitution through motion and rest is essential to discursive systems, like mathematics and experimental science – and, as I’ve implicitly posited, acoustics, musical notion and practices of the sonic. But what emerges here is more than a validation of systematicity and order; as part of the second definition of reason that Deleuze lays out in Practical Philosophy, the common

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notions produce a joy that exceeds single instances of its expression. Alongside Amacher’s third ear music, and Lucier’s anti-anthropocentric vocality, we might think of the Ethics itself as an expressive enactment of the second kind of knowledge. As Daniel Garber explains, “the geometrical structure of the Ethics is perfectly well in accord with the one example Spinoza gives us of the second kind of knowledge of the mean proportion of theorem in Euclid, understood by proof from preceding axioms, definitions and propositions” – it is, Garber continues, the “canonical form of knowledge of the second kind.” 393 And so, on Garber’s reading the Ethics itself trains Spinoza’s readers in the second kind of knowledge, instantiating (or performing) his epistemology in and through its explication.394 Many serious readers of Spinoza describe their initial encounters with the Ethics with a sense of awe and near-mystical fascination that seems to exceed, or for some, contradict its crystalline systematicity. By way of describing his attraction to Spinoza, Louis Althusser writes, “I discovered in him first an astonishing contradiction: this 393

Garber, 115. In IIP40, Scholium Spinoza explicates the case of a merchant using the three kinds of knowledge to carry out a mathematical calculation; “suppose there are three numbers, and the problem is to find a fourth which is to the third as the second is to the first.” Using only the first kind of knowledge, he finds the correct answer because “he has not yet forgotten what he heard from his teacher without any demonstration.” Using the second kind of knowledge, he refers back to the “force of demonstration [my italics] of P19 Book IV of Euclid, namely, from the common property of proportionals.” 394 Garber’s argument hinges on the notion that that the Ethics trains its readers in the second kind of knowledge, “the content of which is knowledge of the third kind.” Thus, the Ethics sets in place the conditions under which we can achieve the third kind of knowledge, without actually leading us there upon completion of the text. Ibid., 115. 228

man who reasons more geometrico – therefore in the most dogmatic way in the world – was in fact an incomparable liberator of the mind. How could dogmatism not only result in the exaltation of freedom but also ‘produce’ it?”395 Indeed, a more attentive engagement with the relation of joy to discursive knowledge might not pose this as a contradiction at all. Similar, Heinrich Heine contrasts the geometrical method to his own sarcastic approach to poetry. “His mathematical method,” Heine writes, “was the direct opposite of my poetic humor and my way of writing; that very precision made me his enthusiastic disciple.”396 While Gatens claims to find Spinoza “hilariously funny,” here Heine activates the precision of the geometric method as such (and not its content) as his inroad into Spinozistic thinking.397 And finally, Deleuze argues that “[Spinoza] is a philosopher who commands and extraordinary conceptual apparatus, one that is highly developed systematic and scholarly; and yet, he is the quintessential object of an immediate, unprepared encounter, such that a non-philosopher…can receive sudden illumination from him, a ‘flash.’”398

395

Louis Althusser. “The Only Materialist Tradition Part I: Spinoza.” In Warren Montag and Ted Stoltze. The New Spinoza. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997, 4. 396 Citied in Genevieve Lloyd. Spinoza and the Ethics. New York: Routledge, 1996, 16. 397 Mora Gatens. In Interview with Susan James and Genevieve Lloyd. “The Power of Spinoza: Feminist Conjunctions.” In Hypathia. Vol 15. No. 2, Going Australian: Reconfiguring Feminism and Philosophy. (Spring 2000): 40-58., 43. 398 Deleuze, Practical Philosophy, 129.

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And so, with Spinoza, discursive systematicity produces an intensity of thought that exceeds the system as such, undermining normative distinctions between rationality and affect, systematicity and transformation, discursive knowledge and embodied knowledge, ideas and tactics. Spinoza’s monistic re-conception of the mindbody union lies at the dissolution of these oppositions. As Amacher and Lucier’s expressive approaches to the particularities of acoustic common notions suggest, grasping things through shared properties does not entail the liquidation of difference or a broader injunction to conformity to power understood as potestas. That is, Amacher’s expressive inner ear doesn’t merge with the sine tones that activate it – the sine tone coax that ear to expresses its capacities with extreme specificity. Lucier’s voice doesn’t dissolve into the room – it sounds a latent version of itself culled by the room’s specificity. Next, I mobilize this newly transformed relations between activity and passivity and hearing to intervene on the dualistic interdiction between discursive knowledge and bodily action articulated by Abbate’s drastic and Gnostic. This intervention animates what Connolly calls the Spinozistic “joy that accompanies enhanced knowledge of the deep structure of things.” 4.4 Thinking, Listening and Speed The immanence of joy to discursive knowledge proposes a tactical approach to the mind that mirrors an identical approach to the body. Grasping the practice of thinking through an ethical tactics further refines the non-dualistic conception of musical

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embodiment toward which I work in this chapter. This entails the dissolution, not of Abbate’s distinction between the “magical” and “machinic” aspects of performance, but between the distinction between Gnostic “interpretation” and performance itself. This argument turns on a re-reading of Abbate’s thought experiment performing Mozart’s “Non temer, amato bene.” While playing the accompaniment, Abbate challenges herself to sustain a historical and interpretative line of questioning but ultimately concludes that “it is virtually impossible to sustain such speculations while playing or absorbed in listening to music that is materially present.”399 Her conclusions rest on a rigid separation of quantitative categories like speed and velocity from thought, while it is precisely their interpenetration, I argue, that posits thought (or, better, in Spinoza’s lexicon ideas) as correlative tactics of the body. Recall here that in his interpretation of Spinoza’s provocation that we do not know what bodies can do, Stuart Hampshire locates this reservoir of untapped capacities within “complex brain states, and hence also [in] the pre-conscious as well as the conscious mind.”400 In his short monograph on Spinoza, Deleuze makes a similar suggestion. By way of describing Spinozistic ethical practice, he writes “it is a matter of showing that the body surpasses the knowledge that we have of it and that thought likewise surpasses the consciousness that we have of it.”401 We are not conscious, so to

399

Carolyn Abbate. “Music: Drastic or Gnostic?” Critical Inquiry. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Vol. 30, No. 3 (Spring, 2004): 505-536, 510. 400 Stuart Hampshire. Spinoza and Spinozism. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005, xliii. 401 Deleuze, Practical Philosophy, 90. 231

speak, of how our blood moves through the veins, or how the immune system works, but that doesn’t mean that those bodily activities are not reflected in the minds capacity for ideational action.402 Using the body’s complex processes as a model for parallel structures within the mind, Deleuze asserts that Spinoza “radically devalues consciousness in favor of thought,” framing the mind as a similarly complex interaction between conscious and pre-conscious content.403 William Connolly expands and consolidates these positions on Spinoza by enfolding them into a broader history of what he calls the intralayered process of thinking that includes Friedrich Nietzsche, William James, Martin Heidegger, historian of science Iliya Prigogine and chemist Isabelle Stengers. Connolly mobilizes this history to explicate thought’s interactive layers as a tactical site through which we can grasp (and intervene upon) the subconscious and affective ground for our ethical and political habits.404 He brokers most of his argument through Nietzsche, mobilizing film, in particular, as an exemplary impetus for experimenting with thought’s differential speeds and velocities in order to interrupt ossified patterns of thought that limit our conception of what ethical and political life can be. To thematize the intralayered character of thinking, Connolly explains, “is to discern how thought 402

Hasana Sharp. “The Force of Ideas in Spinoza.” Political Theory. Vol. 35, No. 6 (Dec., 2007): 732-755, 744. 403 Ibid., 744. 404 So far, I’ve been talking about Spinozistic “thought” through his own discourse on the adequacy and inadequacy of ideas. Here, I follow Connolly’s shift in register, which uses the language of “thinking” to express thought’s restless and processual character. 232

embodies powerful pressures to assimilate new things to old habits of perception and linguistic ‘equalization.’”405 Connolly encourages an understanding of thought that, like Spinoza’s orientation toward bodies, grasps the potentia immanent to its “agreements, disagreements and oppositions.” The “intralayered” character of thought opens discursive knowledge to disruption and destabilization. In music studies, this kind of transformative potential is typically allocated to the body – and Abbate’s drastic/Gnostic polemic is no exception. Abbate agrees that what Nietzsche calls conscious thinking has a domesticating effect on more radical forms of experience. “Conscious thinking,” he tells us in The Gay Science, “especially that of philosophy, is the least vigorous and therefore also the relatively mildest and calmest form of thinking; and thus precisely philosophers are most apt to be lead astray about the nature of knowledge.”406 Nietzsche’s philosophy is like Abbate’s Gnostic – it forgets that the condition of its possibility (the practice of thinking, the site of musical performance) is highly dynamic and richly layered. But in order to overcome this limitation, Abbate re-invests in the presence of the body while Nietzsche reconceptualizes the very nature of thought itself. Where Connolly, through Nietzsche and Spinoza sees intralayered possibility, Abbate sees opposition and mutual exclusion. Abbate’s experiment with “Non temer, amato bene,” produces a hard-and-fast distinction between musicological knowledge and embodied performance. Her

405 406

Connolly, 64. Connolly, 63. 233

musicological line of questioning asks: “where exactly is the Enlightenment subjectivity in these notes? Is the regime of absolute monarchy reflected exactly there, in this phrase? Does this arpeggio represent Idamante’s secret sexual agitation, and exactly how?”407 This knowledge is quickly sidelined – if not erased entirely – by the demands of the score and the instrument. Continuing, after some reflection, she realizes that the thoughts she did have “had nothing to do with signification, being instead doing this really fast is fun or here comes a big jump.”408 Speed and velocity eclipse discursive claims. Performance, ultimately, negate the Gnostic’s explanatory power. Abbate’s polemical overvaluation of discursive statements forecloses unnecessarily on alternative interpretations of her experience playing “Non temer.” While her objective is ostensibly the adequation of thought to a highly specialized bodily activity, her dualistic frame prejudges their incompatibility. While the “Non temer” experiment does demonstrate the ill-suitedness of Abbate’s historical line of questioning, what seems to be happening is something more along the lines of what Connolly, Nietzsche and Deleuze (through Spinoza) attribute to thought’s intralayered character. That is, what happens here is not the articulation or revelation of a mutual exclusion, but instead the exertion of bodily pressure on normative historical knowledge – here, a “New” Musicological version of hermeneutics – that demands a tactical attention that Abbate’s polemic is not patient enough to undertake. In a more

407 408

Abbate, 510 Ibid., 511. 234

explicitly Spinozistic sense, the “Non Temer” experiment may be an injunction to consider how differently expressive systems exert pressure upon one another through performance, analysis and historiographic questioning. Cusick’s discussion of “Aus tiefer Not” stages a similar opposition by measuring the performer’s expressive relation to grace against the listener’s (purportedly analytic) expressive relation using a fixed conception of “musical meaning” as an evaluative rubric. Cusick mobilizes the differential relation between these expressive domains as an injunction to an “embodied” music theory, although a Spinozistic perspective would recognize both positions as always-already embodied. The challenge, in both of these positions, is to bring what appear to be dualistic oppositions into focus as intralayered pressures ! or as what Connolly calls “new habits of linguistic actuality.” Indeed, Connolly’s Nietzsche insists that the practice of cultivating thought is bound to run aground if we don’t attend to correlative work on the body. He writes, A mere disciplining of conscious thoughts and feelings is virtually nothing…, one first has to convince the body. It is decisive…that one should inaugurate culture in the right place – not in the soul…the right place is the body, demeanor, diet, physiology, the rest follows.409 Here, Nietzsche leans heavily on Spinoza’s assertion that all bodily actions entail a mental correlate (and vice versa). Read through this provocation, Cusick’s

409

Friedrich Nietzsche. Twilight of the Idols, no. 47, 101. Cited in Connolly, 76. 235

disembodied analyst is missing something important as a result of her mind-mind engagement with music, but what she’s missing is not insight into “secret meaning” accessible only to performers. Instead, what she misses is insight into the bodily capacities and limitations that her own analytic “disciplining of thoughts” foreclose and make possible. While this Nietzschean provocation activates aspects of Cusick’s “moral” position on embodied knowledge (Cusick’s performer seems to understand this provocation much better than her listener and analyst), it also indicts analytic knowledge and practices that do not attend to their requisite bodily effects and tactics.

4.5 Intralayering “Analysis:” Naomi Cumming, Jacques Lacan and Steve Reich’s Different Trains (1988) Connolly’s Nietzschean conjugation of Spinoza frames Abbate’s Gnostic as a site for tactical destabilization, not dualistic interdiction. The differential and quantitative basis for this tactics brings Deleuze’s invocation of speed and velocity as ethical categories in Practical Philosophy into sharper focus. Recall that, there, Deleuze’s describes “how to live” through a figuration of musical form constituted as “a complex relation between differential velocities, between deceleration and acceleration of [sound] particles.”410 In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze insinuates the category of speed into a broader conception of musical form, claiming (with Guattari, ventriloquizing Pierre Boulez) that “speeds and slownesses inject themselves into

410

Deleuze, 123. 236

musical forms, sometimes impelling it to proliferation, linear microproliferations and sometimes to extinctions, sonorous abolition, involution or both at once.”411 As Scott Burnham helpfully explains, this injunction to motion, speed and velocity is reflected in debates in the history of music theoretical approaches to form regarding whether form should be regarded as “more of an object containing thematic stations [or] a dynamically unfolding process.”412 Warren Darcy and James Hepokoski, for example, introduce sonata form by affirming an energetics of sound; they write, “[Sonata form] drives through a vectored sequence of energized events toward a clearly determined and graspable goal. It is ‘perfect’ because it typically accomplishes that task elegantly, proportionally and completely.”413 Emphasizing movement over human action, Deleuze’s interest in “speeds and slowness” might also resonate with A.B. Marx’s notion that a ternary structure articulated by a dynamic “rest-motion-rest” dynamic or Tovey’s prioritization of phenomenological immediacy.414 Thus, it seems plausible that Deleuze’s mobile Spinozistic sound particle (and its interventions on musical form) can be enfolded into more traditional debates about form, although the Spinozistic derivation of Deleuze’s sound particle demands a thinking of bodies that these canonical accounts do not. Within these parameters, Naomi Cumming’s psychoanalytic account of Steve Reich’s Different Trains (1988) becomes an

411

Deleuze and Guattari, 296. Scott Burnham. “Form” in The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory. Ed. Thomas Christensen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, 897. 413 Warren Darcy and James Hepokoski. Elements of Sonata Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, 283. 414 Burnham, Ibid., 887. 412

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interesting site for thinking the body’s role in analysis. In her analysis, she selfconsciously mobilizes the body as an analytic tool for interpreting the work in terms of its production and representation of movement. Cumming carries out her analysis of Trains by consulting only her aural experience and bodily responses to the work; in explicating and revising Cumming’s method and findings, I do the same. Cumming’s account of music’s immediate and visceral address to the body invokes both normative histories of sonorous immersion and regressive psychic states the does not recognize social partitions or intersubjective distinctions.415 This argument puts Cumming in a difficult position with respect to “New” Musicological thinkers (like McClary) who locate music’s social force in its action upon the body. By using a regressive psychoanalytic category (the Lacanian

415

The relation of Spinozism and psychoanalysis has a rich bibliography and intellectual history – it was part of earlier conceptions of this project, and I hope to reengage that history in the future. The tense correspondence between Spinozistic humanist Romain Rolland and Sigmund Freud is a foundational moment in the conjunction of Spinozistic thought and psychoanalytic practice. In their correspondence (1923-1937), Rolland refers to his limitless sense of immanent connectedness to the world as an “oceanic feeling,” and asks Freud to account for it in psychoanalytic terms. In Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), Freud associates Rolland’s “oceanic feeling” with the pre-Oedipal, a regressive state priori to the spatialization of the psyche. Kaja Silverman takes up this “oceanic feeling” in her The Acoustic Mirror. Silverman uses Freud’s association of early development with boundarylessness to elaborate the concept of the sonorous envelope, a replication of the immersive plenitude of the mother’s voice. Using this argument, Silverman develops a critique of the role of the female voice in cinema that is frequently identified with “intractable materiality and consequently [alienated] from meaning.” Kaja Silverman. The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988, 61; Henri Vermorel. Sigmund Freud et Romain Rolland: Correspondence 1923-1936. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1993. 238

“Real”) to account for that action, Cumming implicitly places the body outside the social, positing its “activity, material practice, work and [procedures] as noetically unknowable.”416 Spinoza’s co-constitutive conception of the mind-body union offers an alternative solution. That is, precisely because everything that happens in the body happens immediately and in parallel fashion in the mind, bodily actions and affections are always-already mentally accessible through tactical work. And because we carry out that tactical work on the “total milieu” of the body, it can never be posited as prior to the social. I have been reflecting on Different Trains for some time. Here, I rethink Cumming’s analysis along a two different axes. One: I think of the work as expressive, thus collapsing her hierarchical model of listening. And two: I reconstitute her psychoanalytic categories through the registers of movement, rest and speed. The work is scored for amplified string quartet and tape. The tape part is comprised of a second recorded string quartet, trains (wheels, whistles), sirens and voices. The work unfolds over the course of three movements: 1. America – Before the War; 2. Europe – During the War; 3. America – After the War. These movements trace a historical trajectory into and out of the Second World War through a harrowing middle movement, narrated by survivors, about the German invasions of Hungary and Holland and subsequent transport to camps in Poland. I rehearsed and performed the

416

Paul Hamilton, review of Richard Harland, Superstructuralism in Textual Practice, Vol. III, No. 2 (Summer, 1989): 259-63, 61. Cited in Christopher Norris. Spinoza and the Origins of Modern Critical Theory. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991, 50. 239

work in 2002 and more recently analyzed its productive, though problematic, ill-fit with Giorgio Agamben, Paul Ricoeur and Shoshana Felman’s theories of testimonial speech.417 Although Cumming doesn’t engage this archive, her prioritization of embodied listening and analysis is not unlike mine in that it is structured around the body’s status as an agent for the production of knowledge and uses a highly developed theoretical apparatus to explain why the body might have such a capacity. Using Lacanian categories, Cumming outlines three “positions” that listeners might assume in relation to Trains. As she goes on to explain, Listener A aligns with the Lacanian Real, Listener B with the Imaginary and Listener C with the Symbolic. Listener A takes a position of participatory involvement with repetitive processes, which he experiences as comforting or horrible by turns. He is immersed in the rhythm, allowing it to create subliminal movements in the body, and to have an impact on his emotional states. Listener B finds herself more engaged with the shaping of motives derived from the vocal incipits. She recognizes the vocal shapes as ones she herself could conceivably utter, and identifies with what she imagines to be the affective states conveyed, even to the point of making scarcely visible movements mimicking the “gestural” motion she hears in the musical

417

Giorgio Agamben. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. New York: Zone, 2002; Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub. Testiomony: Crisis of Witnessing in Literatue, Psychoanalysis and History. New York: Routledge, 1992. Paul Ricoeur. History, Memory, Forgetting. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. 240

fragments. Listener C assumes a more objectifying stance, recognizing the “train” as a represented item. She is not immersed in the rhythmic motion, nor identified with imagined affective states, but more concerned with categorizing the sounds, as representing definite objects, or as ordered in a manner reminiscent of some minimalist works she knows.418 Cumming’s first two positions propose qualitatively different modes of bodily engagement: the first motoric and machinic, the second gestural and interpersonal. The third position is neither bodily engaged nor affectively reflective, but interested in the work’s success at representing objects of history and its place in an iterative minimalist canon more broadly. Trains offers a rich site for rethinking these positions through the category of speed precisely because the history of differential movement of bodies lies at the core of the work’s topoi. If we posit, as Cumming does, the work’s central conflict in its complex counterposition of, first, the transcontinental passage from New York to Los Angeles on “one of the fastest trains,” and second, the trans-European passage from Holland and Hungary to the camps “for four days and four nights,” we move the categories of speed and movement to the center of the work’s expressive reticulation of history. Cumming’s Listener A (the entrained listener I discuss in Chapter 3) is ostensibly the most thoroughly engaged with the propulsive force of the train’s ostinato, rendered 418

Naomi Cumming. “The Horrors of Identification: Reich’s ‘Different Trains.’” Perspective of New Music. Vol. 35, No. 1, (Winter 1997): 129-152, 134. 241

mostly through the first and second violins in the live quartet. However, precisely because Listener A’s participation with the ostinato is based in psychic regression, that participation entails only “comfort and horror;” Listener A cannot enfold the ostinato into a more broadly expressive reading that exceeds its immediate effects. In a Spinozistic perspective, Listener A has only inadequate knowledge. As Cumming explains, however, the speed and density of the vocal incipits intervene on Listener A’s propensity for entrained, empathetic (and because empathetic, in Cumming’s frame, ahistorical) movement, proposing a kind of tactical interplay between the voices and the ositinato’s inexorable forward momentum. She writes, “the speed of delivery and patterns of acceleration are particularly important here because in their direct imitation, they have a direct impact on the perceived tempo of the train (the ostinato patterns speed up or slow down to accommodate changes in gestural enunciation).”419 Cumming’s consistent association of the vocal incipits with gesture encourages us to think of them as rising and falling intervallic relations, deemphasizing the important imbrication of timbre with rhythmic clarity that circumscribes their position within the quartet’s composite sound. Reich allocates the rhythmic imitation of the vocal lines almost exclusively to the viola and cello, emplacing his speaking survivors in the “middle” of the quartet’s registral space. The viola’s vocal mirroring is overwhelmingly set in the instrument’s middle and lower register, yoking the voice to a challenging register for projection and thus risking subsumption within the texture. If indeed Cumming’s Listener B prioritizes the 419

Ibid., 141. 242

speaking voices, that priority draws her toward the registral center of the quartet, placing her interpersonal efforts at identification tensely between the ostinato’s articulation of speed and propulsion in higher (violins) and lower registers (cello). While Cumming is sensitive to the intralayered possibility that the vocal incipits impinge on the ostinato’s momentum, she is not equally engaged with the differential pacing of the incipits through the work’s duration. Our introduction to the work’s thematization of travel, speed and movement arrives through the first few vocal incipits: “from Chicago,” “from Chicago to New York,” “one of the fastest trains,” “from New York to Los Angeles.” These incipits’ instrumental mirroring produces highly syncopated rhythmic fragments, which tend to begin on small subdivisions of the beat. The speeds at which trains crisscross the U.S. are propelled by rhythmic and metrical complexity in the voices that explicate them. In the second movement “During the War,” the rhythmic orientation of the incipits changes radically.420 Vocal events and their instrumental counterparts are placed conspicuously on the beat, which is typically divided into even eighth-note groupings, or unsyncopated sixteenth-note patterns. Insofar as Cumming’s Listener B identifies with the speaker, on my reading, she also attends to the pressure the text exerts on the ostinato, throwing differential or cumulative velocity relations into relief. To the extent that this newly complexified Listener B cognizes these pressures, she begins to grasp the work as an articulation of “agreements, differences and oppositions.” 420

There are a few exceptions here: “for four days and four nights;” “they tattooed a number on our arm;” “Polish names” are set with syncopation. 243

The challenge, here, is to incorporate Cumming’s Listener C into this interpretive scheme. Listener C poses a problem for Cumming in the sense that she frames only the “Symbolic” listener as properly accountable to historical knowledge, musical representation and the articulation of genre. An expressive reading of Trains proposes speed and velocity as part of the intricate expressive network by which Trains articulates that knowledge and the work proposes the condition of possibility for Listener C’s position through yet another modulation of these parameters. I locate this proposal approximately three-quarters the way through Trains’ first movement. There, as though the work becomes conscious of the Listener C’s interest in representation, the first movement abandons it self-identification with “one of the fastest trains,” replacing that thematic validation of speed with an almost caricatured transition into historical time: the voice simply states “In 1939…,” binding the speed the work initially celebrated to a sense of anticipation, dread and fear that is historical in character. This statement is accompanied by an acceleration in the ostinato, an abrupt change in register (from the high to middle registers in the first and second violin) and a slight change in dynamic from forte to something slight softer than mezzo forte. But the interruptive effect of this passage is not reducible to these parametric changes; rather, it lies in the introduction of a new and highly complex temporal register at which to assess the multiple paces of the work’s unfolding. Now, the differential speeds articulated by the action of the voices upon the ostinato (and vice versa) interact with a third complex of velocity: the category of historical time.

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This meditation on Different Trains wagers an interpretive frame that de-stratifies Cumming’s listenerly positions through the rubric of speed. Prioritizing the work’s intralayered character, this reading proposes the interaction of affect, rhythm and historical representation as an interaction of “speeds and slowness,” positing these terms as quantitatively distinct matters of expression. This set of parameters lays the groundwork for future, and more detailed work, on the how these three interactive quantities render forth the work’s fraught thematization of movement.

4.6 An Ethics of Joy

Spinoza’s ethics, Gatens explains, “cannot be understood in terms of a fixed moral code: a list of ‘thou shalt nots.’”421 Rather, Spinoza’s ethics propose a program of tactical experimentation in bodily and mental practice that aims at maximizing our capacity to experience and transmit joy. “The Ethics,” Deleuze remarks, “is necessarily an ethics of joy; only joy remains, bringing us near to action and to the bliss of action.”422 The body and the mind are necessarily parallel sites for this ethical work, which requires “attention to the collective dimensions of thinking (and embodied) life, where ‘collective’ refers to a transpersonal accumulation of ideal power that includes humans and well and non human beings.”423 As Hasana Sharp

421

Gatens, 6. Deleuze, Practical Philosophy, Cited in Gatens, 6. 423 Sharp, 733. 422

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suggests, our capacity to cultivate joyful adequate knowledge about non-human things (the resonant frequency of Lucier’s room, the tempo relations in Reich’s quartet, the pitch of Amacher’s sine tone) emplaces the materials in and through which we cultivate ethical living, like the very constitution of the bodily, within the complete milieu of the thinking and embodied subject. Connolly describes this ethics as an immanent naturalism. This view conceives of the world a unified field rife with potentiality in the manner of Spinoza’s single infinite substance. Natural and cultural forces interact within this field, and though they may not be amenable to representational practices, they are open to “practices of cultural inscription and experimental tactics of intervention.”424 While Spinozism founds this position, Connolly places thinkers as diverse as Foucault, Massumi, Gatens, Epicurus, Lucretius, and of course, Deleuze and Nietzsche within this category. As he explains, “most immanent naturalists support an ethic in which visceral attachment to life and the world provides the preliminary soil from which commitment to more generous identifications, responsibilities and connections might be cultivated.”425 Part IV of the Ethics is overwhelmingly concerned with what happens to adequate ideas when they are shared – that is, the extent to which adequate ideas form something like the “preliminary soil” to which Connolly refers. As Antonio Negri asserts, in Part IV of the Ethics, Spinoza “projects the adequacy of cognitive activity

424 425

Connolly, 85 Connolly, 85 246

and physical capacity onto socio-political terrain.”426 Through this process, a tightly concentric collection of active affects and actions aggregate around the joy and empowerment immanent to reason. Love emerges when we connect joy with an external cause. Virtue unifies conative desire with adequate ideas, grounding our perseverance in existence to rationality. “Acting from virtue,” Spinoza continues, “is nothing else in us but acting, living and persevering one’s being by the guidance of reason, and doing this from the foundation of seeking one’s own advantage.”427 Sociality is immanent to this project of perseverance. Early in Part IV, Spinoza reminds us that “we can never bring it about that we require nothing outside ourselves to preserve our being.”428 The composite body appears as a heuristic. Man, I say, can only wish that for nothing more helpful to the preservation of his being than that all should so agree in all things that the minds and bodies of all would compose, as it were, one mind and one body; that all should strive together as far as they can to preserve their being and that they should seek for themselves the common advantage of all.429 This common striving becomes a form of sociability insofar as we understand that, on the one hand, that the more we strive in the way, the more we empower others to do

426

Antonio Negri. Subversive Spinoza: (un)Contemporary Variations. Trans. Timothy S. Murphy. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004, 107. 427 Ethics, IV, P24, Demonstration. 428 Ethics, IV P18, Scholium. 429 Ethics, IV, P18, Scholium. 247

so as well, and on the other, that others’ striving increases our own capacities. Cooperation, in this sense, intensifies individuation. As Spinoza explains, “the good which everyone who seeks virtue wants to himself he also desires for other men; and this desire is greater as his knowledge of God is greater.” Virtuous and rational subjects know that, in view of virtue’s constitution in God’s infinitude, rational joy can only be intensified the more others come to share it. Immanent naturalism demands a new set of questions and answers about why we act the way we do. Outlining those questions, Connolly toggles back and forth between the ethical and moral, highlighting the law-like nature of the moral over a more tactical vision for the ethical. With the translation of the transcendental into the immanent, you revise some questions of ethics given priority in the transcendental and quasi-transcendental traditions. You shift the priority of the question “why should I be moral?” or “what is the transcendental or contractual basis of morality?” or “what is the subjective capacity presupposed by the practice of morality?” to “how do you cultivate presumptive responsiveness and generosity in a pluralistic culture?”… one can strengthen or modify a sensibility, to some uncertain degree, by working tactically upon the infrasensible register in which it is set.430 By thinking of responsivness as “presumptive,” Connolly implies that this responsiveness is presumed by culture as such – the ethical task he wagers is the 430

Connolly, 104. 248

cultivation of something that always-already constitutive of life. In a Spinzositic sense, our dependence on other bodies is thoroughly assumed along multiple axes, ranging from the nourishment of the human body to the social organization of ethical subjects. The ethical question that Spinoza’s puts to is how to activate this network of dependence through the circulation of knowledge, joy and bodily empowerment. The challenge here is not to internalize morality as a form of law, but to become increasingly attuned to the demands our substantial unity with others make on us. Similarly, Heidi Morrison Ravven describes Spinoza’s ethics as an “ethics without praise or blame but with a complex and multifaceted account of how and why we act the way we do, why we lay claim to our actions as our own and feel responsible for them despite our determinism, and how we can intervene in social systems to promote cooperation and also in our understanding of the necessary causes of our beliefs and emotions to initiate changes in our own feelings and actions.”431 Insofar as the end of Spinoza’s ethics is “understanding,” self-reflexive explication (instead of judgment) becomes an expressly ethical activity. Again, it is in the kind of knowledge (and parallel bodily capacities) that we use for that explication that gives it social or ethical power. The objective here is not to become adequate to a moral or ethical exemplar, but to participate in the production and transmission of joyful rationality as a social project.

431

Heidi Morrison Ravven. “Embodying and Naturalizing Ethics.” In Feminist Interpretations of Benedict Spinoza. Ed. Moira Gatens. University Park: University of Pennsylvania Press: 2009, 137-8. 249

4.7 Conclusions and Reconfigurations

In the introduction to this dissertation, I tied this project to an early (and somewhat fuzzily thought through) refusal to pursue a thinking of musical bodies through my own musical practice. That suspicion rested on precisely the kind of persistent Cartesianism in examine in Chapter 1. Just as Abbate locates heroism and exemplary courage in the failure of Ben Heppner’s voice, so was I ready to think of my sometimes-painful and nearly always-unstable practice of free improvisation as an exemplary deprioritization of bodily ease for “newness” and “intensity” in sound. The Cartesian economy of suffering speaks clearly through both examples. Further reflection on my improvisational practice throws this economy into relief again and again—its oppositional power, it seems, was only equaled by its intractability. As though following Susan McClary’s formula in Noise, my interest in improvisation in the first place was concomitant with a post-Conservatory commitment to “not be silenced by the institutional framework” through “injecting” noise, affect and bodily spontaneity into my relationship with the viola. 432 In dialogue with my long-term collaborator, bassoonist Katherine Young, this meant selfconsciously excising extended techniques we found aurally and physically generative (mutiphonics, complex harmonics, extreme timbral modification) from the post-war

432

Susan McClary. “Afterword.” In Jacques Attali. Noise: The Political Economy of Music. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 157. 250

Euro-American modernist repertoire from which we learned them.433 Rejecting a onceabiding commitment to that repertoire was simultaneously a rejection of Cusick’s reviled mind-mind approach to executing complex music and a refusal of Abbate’s “machinic” conception of performance. The objective: divert music’s institutional power toward the power of bodies – a paradigmatic dualist reversal. This oppositional gambit failed. Not only were these mind-centric institutions uninterested in (and immune to) the fact of our rejection, this anti-Cartesian position did not, in and of itself, ground a viable musical practice. “Improvising” under this anti-dualist injunction meant having to deliver on its brassy veneration of bodily spontaneity and creativity. Was a performance spontaneous, intense, oppositional or creative enough? The question was always posed in the negative, and the answers we offered each other were seldom more illuminating that the slow and sparse applause that implied that the audience’s answer was “no.” Two facets of this anti-Cartesian approach stand out here. While it offered a powerful rhetorical frame making the transition from notated music to improvisation practice, this approach could not buttress new proposals about what making that transition would then allow bodies to do. Lacking such a tactics, our performances seemed to also lack transmissible content and, thus, expressive force. That is to say, they had little social traction.

433

A great deal of this reflection was developed in dialogue with Katherine Young. I am grateful for her help in developing this particular narrative trajectory of our nearly ten-year-long (and counting) collaboration. 251

Ultimately, taking this anti-Cartesian position in performance placed us in a posture of sonic and social indecision, as though we had unwittingly animated Descartes’ own conflicted understanding of music’s relation to certainty, along with his prescriptive separation of music from (rational) sociality. In order to rethinking what stability and sociality were going to mean in our musical practice, this antiCartesian rhetoric had to be refashioned as a “visceral attachment” to something in and through which we could develop an expressive tactics. In other words, anti-Cartesian positionality would have to become immanent expressivity. For our duo, this unfolded, first and foremost, through a re-emplacement of instrumental materiality at the center of our musical practice. Second, this project pursued an emphasis on the bodily loci of our instruments’ technical; mine are visible (and sometimes all-too demonstrative), for example, which Katherine’s are not. Like any matters of expression, the viola and bassoon each maintain an immanent connection to some set of sonorous capacities: timbral variance, register, dynamic extremes, speed and slowness of articulation. In the manner of Lucier’s voice and the room in which he “is sitting,” we sought zones of consistency within our instruments’ expressive parameters. These consistencies became the foundation of our composite sound. This “tactics” came to ground formal elaboration of the intralayered nuances our at instruments’ expressive parameters made possible. But what’s interesting, here, is not the para-compositional practices we have ultimately come to cultivate, but their emergence through a perspective that grasps our instrumental materials and technical

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skills through “the agreements, differences and oppositions” that articulate what they share in common – a form of adequate knowledge. Mobilizing our instrumental materials through their sonorous capacity for consistency replaced our initial antiCartesian frame with a robust sense of expressive structure. And although as a result, our composite sound actually became more aggressive, abrasive and more abstract, our orientation toward our audience – toward the social event of performance – changed radically. How and why? In this chapter, I have ascribed a form of Spinozistic joy to the adequate knowledge of structure and system, effacing the distinction between affect and discursive knowledge. Once we grounded our performances on this structured expressivity, that structure’s affective correlate emerged as an extremely relaxed, very communicative and markedly funny orientation towards our audiences that stands in stark contrast to what our music sounds like. This is not a contradiction. When Spinoza’s understanding of rationality takes shape, in Part IV, as an argument for community, the parallel bodily and mental empowerment that musical activity inculcates implicitly become activated as force for the production and circulation of rational joy. If the duo in question has any share in the production of such rational joy, that joy is a result of an expressive network that encompasses not only human subjects, but instrumental materialities and the forms of structure immanent to them. A number of questions remain open, here. How would the musical scenario I’ve been describing respond to Connolly’s immanent naturalist question: how do you

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cultivate presumptive responsiveness and generosity in a pluralistic culture? Or, Ravven’s related questions: why do we lay claim to our actions as our own and feel responsible for them despite our determinism, and how we can intervene in social systems to promote cooperation? Music may be a compelling site at which to think that “determinism” precisely because of the complex way in which its materialities exert expressive pressure upon one another. And yet, the joyful rationality that emerges through adequate knowledge of that expressivity is both immanently social and the basis for tactical upon and within the social. In this chapter, I hope to have laid the groundwork for a more robust thinking of sociality based on a non-dualistic conception of the human being and a univocal conception of expression.

! ! !

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Conclusion

Suzanne Cusick’s “Feminist Theory/Music Theory and the Mind/Body Problem” (1994) has appeared almost motivically throughout this project: first as a paradigmatic reversal of dualism, second as a lasting motivation for contemporary work on the body and third through the reconstitution of its “secret knowledge” through expressive procedures. The aspect of Cusick’s argument, that underpins this project most deeply, however, has nothing to do with these three instantiations. As often as this article is cited as an injunction to attend to musical bodies, Cusick’s wagers a second demand that is rarely addressed. She writes, “In the modern-era, speculation about music has not been the dominant strand of music theory – but it has never quite gone away either. And it is in that philosophy-oriented corner of the discipline that I would expect a theory of musical bodies to flourish.”434 She goes on to demand nothing less than “a theory that can resolve the Mind/Body problem.”435 She charges music theory, the disciplinary enclave she holds responsible for constructing musical knowledge as a collaboration between the composing mind and the analyst, with the resolution of the Cartesian separation of mind from body. Cusick’s injunction is not primarily interdisciplinary – it is musical and it is philosophical. In this sense, its parameters are more tightly drawn than my own in this

Suzanne Cusick. “Feminist Theory, Music Theory and the Mind/Body Problem.” Perspective of New Music. Vol. 32, No. 1, (Winter 1994): 8-27, 22. 435 Ibid., 22. 434

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project. Nonetheless, throughout this project, I have demonstrated that even an alloyed philosophical approach precipitates conceptual transformation in multiple disciplinary registers. Just as I aimed not to use philosophy to wager a “true” account of the mindbody union, however, I similarly do not mobilize Spinoza’s thought, here, as a “quickfix” for a celebrated philosophical problem that has come to constitute our field of study. Taken as matter of expression, Cusick’s injunction assembles to itself a complex historical, musical and textual milieu – it posits, in other words, an interdependence of discourses on the body, tracing new critical itineraries within the intellectual history of the mind-body problem. I imagine many forms this itinerary might take in this project’s multidirectional future. For example, I imaging writing a critique of the Compendium from Princess Elizabeth’s perspective, or staging a dialogue between Elizabeth and Spinoza regard the problem of interaction in Descartes’ mind-body dualism. I imagine that these encounters will exert different pressures on music studies’ prioritization of the body than the pressures that I highlight in this project through my musically inflected counterposition of Descartes and Spinoza. At the beginning of this project, I claimed to want a “flexible and pliable approach” for thinking about musical bodies. In hindsight, it seems that that collection of adjectives was really intended to say that I wanted to theorize about bodies while at the same time reflecting on what theorizing about bodies presumes bodies to be capable of. Consequently, I hope that the conclusions this project has reached are to

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some degree transportable – I hope they can illuminate specific musical situations in which bodies exceed themselves, instruments fail, audiences misbehave (or cohere) and knowledge is shared or distributed. In many ways, this project is an experiment in assessing what aspects of socio-musical specificity different theoretical approaches can illuminate or obscure. While the musicological anti-Cartesians shine a bright light on bodies’ disruptive capacities, my Spinozistic approach sees a robust production and transmission of knowledge in expressive interaction between organic and inorganic things. I am curious about how these two perspectives might interact as dual analytic approaches to the specificity of socio-musical activity. And yet, I also think that detailed attention to these philosophical problems is attention to the specificity of a particular situation precisely to the extent that those philosophical problems undergird disciplinary (and social…and political…and cultural) assumptions about what bodies can do. My hope is that the expanded conception of “embodied knowledge” my readings propose will makes visible new bodily practices and tactics. Once uncoupled from the heroic and risky task of performance, a non-dualist focus on the body might attend to how musical practice distributes some bodily capacities (and not others) across the social field, creating differential zones of vulnerability, endurance, action and what Elizabeth Povinelli calls, after Brian Massumi, miraculization ! an enactment (or, expression) of a previously unthinkable reality. One future I envision for this project is a move in precisely this biopolitical direction, drawing more explicit connection

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between Spinozistic bodies and the Foucauldian “ethics of substance” through which Povinelli herself cleaves a compromise between substantial and desubstantial bodies. In a broader sense, this project has shifted the place of embodied performance in musicological thought. According to the anti-Cartesian perspectives of Cusick, McClary and Abbate, performers are the keepers of secret knowledge, agents for the transduction of sociality and stewards of music’s ethical exemplarity. In the Spinozistic perspective I have rendered here, musical performance is a form of knowledge production, it is form of sociality and it is part of the cultivation of ethical projects, but it is all of these things precisely in view of a substantially united, nonanthropocentric view of materiality and its expressive capacities. Reconstituting the mind-body relation in a monist milieu, as I’ve implied, also precipitates a rethinking of related binary oppositions: nature/culture, reason/affect, men/women. Connecting this project with discourses as diverse as actor-network theory, neuroscience and Spinozistic feminism proposes rich futures for my research here. The now-porous distinction between reason and joy registers powerfully in the fraught relationship between analysis and performance. While some posit formal analysis as affectless, bloodless and disembodied, a Spinozistic conception of knowledge would assess that bodiless conception of analysis with regard to its adequacy vis-à-vis its causes. The mind-mind formula for analysis might be inadequate in the Spinozistic sense insofar as it cannot grasp musical works and practices through their material causes – which in this case should be understood not

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only as the actions of bodies, but the expressive pressures they exert on nonhuman and nonorganic things. This is not a matter of either dispensing with formal analysis, nor venerating materiality, but instead a question of developing an intralayered way of thinking how they can be correlated. Bringing this intralayered conception of thought to bear on now-stabilized disciplinary methods – formal analysis, hermeneutics, archival research, “theory” of different types, and of course performance – is not something I do explicitly here, but hope to have laid the groundwork for future work. This work might proceed by seeking new instantiations and new milieu for the exhortation that we do not know what a body can do.

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Works Cited Abbate, Carolyn. “Music: Drastic or Gnostic?” Critical Inquiry. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Vol. 30, No. 3 (Spring 2004): 505-536. Aktipis, C. Athena, Gregory A. Bryant, Jessica Phillips-Silver. Music Perception: An Interdiscplinary Journal. Vol. 28, No. 1. (September 2010). Agamben, Giorgio. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. New York: Zone, 2002. Althusser, Louis. “The Only Materialist Tradition Part I: Spinoza.” In Warren Montag and Ted Stoltze. The New Spinoza. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Amacher, Maryanne. “Head Rhythm 1” and “Plaything 2.” Sound Characters: Making the Third Ear. New York: Tzadik, 1999. Ariew, Roger; Des Chene, Dennis; Jesseph, Douglas M.; Schmaltz, Tad M.; Verbeek, Theo. The Historical Dictionary of Descartes and Cartesian Philosophy. Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2003. Augst, Bertrand. “Descartes’ Compendium of Music.” In Journal of the History of Ideas.Vol. 26, No. 1 (Jan- March, 1965): pp. 119-132. Balibar, Etienne. Spinoza and Politics. New York: Verso, 2002. Barthes, Roland. “The Grain of the Voice.” In Image, Music Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977.

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