blah-feme

habitus extinct

Hadrianus Junius, Emblemata (1565)

I have often wondered how it might be possible to unsteady the deepest cultural habits, to problematise the stranglehold of what Bourdieu would no doubt have termed the 'habitus', that 'operation of culture onto the body': what are the real prospects for upturning the habitus, for engaging in a kind of scholarship that sets out, in the spirit of an absolute activism, to shake the deeply embedded gender ideologies of Western masculinity to its core? We might even think this as in some sense a hopelessly Foucauldian move, a smart, even witty arse-bearing at faux fiends and make-believe monsters, always shouting as if with the pious zealot's commitment, but really speaking from a mandarin position of loathsome aristocratic detachment.

And here is the key problem - how are we to think this without this loathsome aristocratic detachment, how to make the process simply begin, even start to unsettle without noting something that is at core absurd in the attempt? Maybe humour is the only way, maybe comedy the best chance for an unsettling; the absurd, it seems, might be one way to name that which is dangerous, that which flouts the rules of so-called common sense, which refuses the hegemonic stranglehold on what is acceptable and what ridiculous.

Let's begin at a place I know quite well, and one that draws me back to it over and over (why is this this? perhaps that's a different post). I want to visit late nineteenth-century Vienna and ask these questions about comedy, the absurd, the ridiculous pose of thinking as if no longer inside, no longer implicated in the hegemonic stranglehold of that body, that male, swaggering graphism that haunts every attempt to think it differently, to think as if we were infinitely malleable. Why Vienna and why then? Well it is a place, I suggest, where we come to see, possibly at its most intense, some of the the ways in which the modern habitus is put into place, disciplined and held under the powerful sway of masculine hegemony; this is the moment of Freud, of film, of radio, of phonography, of regimes, of health farms, of endless quirky sanitoria.. the place of the first celebrities, of the first rehab, of the first Priory.

Recourse to the cultural-historical shorthand of taxonomy (from the Greek taxis [‘arrangement’] and nomos [‘law’]) is something of which Michel Foucault was especially fond. At the Viennese fin de siècle, a place Foucault rarely visited, taxonomies proliferate, but, unlike the exotic taxonomies of the Foucauldian archéologie, they do so according to a logic that is seductively close to our own: they proliferate in order to fill out or thicken the empirical texture of the world. Laughter fills Foucault’s response to the exotic taxonomies of distant and strange places, and the purpose of that laughter is quite explicit – to articulate the seductive nature of difference. There is also laughter to be had for us, no doubt, in the face of fin-de-siècle Viennese taxonomies, but this is a laughter which resounds in response to a set of epistemological problems rather too similar to our own: the seductive epistemological closeness of the Viennese fin de siècle, its metropolitan imagination, its fascination for decline and degeneration and its obsession with the inner self, might so easily stand in for our own late modern predicament.

Hegemonic masculinities, those which shore up, enrich and polemicise atavistic claims to men’s a priori right to public discourse, become describable at the fin de siècle by means of a new proliferation of taxonomial adjectives: it becomes possible at last to speak empirically or ‘in detail’ of men, to understand men as objects of scrutiny, to construe them as susceptible to the operation of discourse. In this, the Austro-German fin de siècle marks a ‘thickening’ (a somatising) of the solidity of masculine hegemony by making available to that hegemony a new set of epistemological tools with which to define, circumscribe and construe itself.

This self-discoursing nonetheless brings with it a consequent and paradoxical ‘thinning’ of hegemony, a counter-effect to the thickening, which threatens men’s exclusive access to discourse: characterisation, description and other forms of empirical ‘capture’ are also the very same processes through which man had sought to ‘capture’ the feminine and through which man now becomes the object of his own discourse. This is the double bind of the new empirical man-object: on the one hand it is ‘thickened’ by its detailed taxonomical capture in the empirical discourses; on the other, it thereby loses its invisible, relatively unchallenged, status as silent bearer of discourse.

A ubiquitous response to this double bind was to deliberately appropriate more self-consciously atavistic discursive markers of masculinity – markers which had seemed, until the medicalisation of men that marked the fin de siècle, to operate without impediment, to operate as salient and powerful assurances of man’s power before his constitution as patient and case study. These atavistic markers – amongst which we might include textual authority, physical strength, uprightness, moral and intellectual superiority and a firm grasp of the public arena – seemed, in the fin de siècle imagination, to call up a golden age of Arcadian masculinity: undoubtedly, what characterises the operation of hegemonic masculinity at the fin de siècle is thus a kind of gender nostalgia.

 It is no doubt the case that men have consistently made (and continue to make) recourse to the operation of coercive discourse in order to articulate their masculinity as inevitably hegemonic, but at the fin de siècle this habit takes on a particularly intense quality. By figuring authority, reputation and/or professional competence as contiguous with virility, men take flight into hyperbolic phallic discourse: this discourse finds expression in body-discoursing through an emphasis on bodily well-being and a normalised physical masculinity on the one hand, and in the aestheticisation of political life and a withdrawal into the intellect (a flight from the body) on the other. The Danish pedagogue Jens Peter Müller’s exaggerated Hellenic poses in his exercise system Mein System (1905) demonstrate how the nostalgic masculinity of the fin de siècle finds expression also in a rage against the new:

A portion of the authors of our belles-lettres have done incalculable harm to the young people in our society by systematically championing, through personal example as well as through their writings, a mixture of exclusively intellectual culture, physical weakness and moral sickness…. The typical office worker in big cities is often a sad sight. Hunched over in early years, his shoulders and hips made crooked by the awkward position at his desk, his face pale, pimply, and powdered, his thin neck sticking out of a collar that a normal could use as a cuff, his foppish, fashionable suit rotating around pipe-cleaners that are supposed to be arms.

Müller’s emphasis on physicality underlines the nostalgic quality of masculinity at the fin de siècle and shows how that nostalgia can find expression in exaggerated binarisms: sickly modern urban (false) man versus the healthy physicality of the (true) Arcadian, intellectuals versus the ‘normal’, moral weakness versus moral health. It is also evident here that the metonymic juxtaposition of physical and moral weakness is meant to dramatise the moral malaise of metropolitan culture, a malaise which is written onto the bodies of its weak and sickly men.

The Körperkult or body cult of the Viennese hegemon thus always finds its counterpart in the dreamy aestheticism of groups like the Secessionists and their emphasis on ornament and, in its popular reception, on the consumption of objets d’art. Hence, the ‘virility’ of which I speak above is neither fully ‘physical’ nor completely figurative, but held at the level of discourse, having a vividly affective and effective cultural life – it functions at the level of the habitus, the discursive imagination of the body.

As we see from Müller’s System, images of exemplary male bodies, of exemplary masculine physical attitudes, undoubtedly touch the discursive operation of hegemonic masculinity, but it is also in the invisibility of the male body, its trussing and wrapping in the anonymous garb of institutional misogyny that masculinity continues to try to operate its silent monopoly: this is the other side of gender nostalgia, its yearning for the discursive silence of Arcadian masculinity.

The ‘strong’ gender thus attempts to sustain its operative power by engaging a dichotomous strategy: a refusal of physical objectification – resisting its reconstitution by the new sciences and continuing to insist on physicality as a privileged site of the feminine – on the one hand, and an embracing of exaggerated images of physical masculinity on the other.

Characteristics, typologies, nomenclatures – the stuff of taxonomy – operate as shorthand for the messy operation of cultural fields. The characteristics of masculinity which proliferate in the new fin-de-siècle ‘sciences’ of gender and sexuality are too numerous to name, but those of the hegemon centre on an anxious overarticulation of physical and figurative solidity – Festigkeit, Standhaftigkeit, Geradheit, Rechtschaffenheit, Zuverlässigkeit, Tapferkeit, Aufrichtigkeit, Virilität, Zeugungskraft. The typologies are fewer – soldier, monarch, entrepreneur, worker, artist, author, intellectual; its nomenclatures are fewer still – man, and in the new medicalised discourse of sexuality, heterosexual.

In this taxonomy, the logic of masculine ‘solidity’ or Festigkeit is assured by a double-edged refusal of and simultaneous recourse to the new medicine in sexology, psychiatry and psychoanalysis. In 1886, Richard Krafft-Ebing published his Psychopathia Sexualis in which he outlined the prospect for a science of sexual pathology and in which hegemonic masculinity (‘the divine image of the poet’) is juxtaposed with its shadowy counterparts (‘horrid caricatures’):

Whosoever proposes psychopathology as [the object of] scholarly study confronts there the dark sides of human existence and the sufferings of man in whose shadow the glistening divine image of the poet is turned into horrid caricatures and the aesthetic and the moral lose faith in the eternal image of God. It is the sad privilege of medicine, and especially of psychiatry, to have to witness the reverse side of life, human weaknesses and wretchedness.

What is interesting here for our purposes is the almost melodramatic (even ‘Gothic’) characterisation of counter-hegemonic masculinity. Just as the ‘glistening divine image of the poet’ [‘das glänzende Götterbild des Dichters’] finds its counterpart in his ‘dark sides of human existence’ [‘einer Nachtseite menschlichen Lebens’], so fin-de-siècle gender and sexuality, as medicalised discourses of personality, work with asymmetrical binarisms that place a certain amount of pressure on undersides, hidden worlds, dark mirror images, others, to reflect back the glistening hegemony of the bourgeois male: distorted mirror images, pale reflections, creatures of the night that stalk the haunted psyche of the bourgeois male all figure as proliferating viral others to the singularity of the hegemonic male.

This underworld is peopled by the pale and the emaciated, a derivative world of mockery, mimicry, false gods and vicious dandies. Perhaps most crucially, this underworld, or perhaps better ‘world of the others,’ is also a world of the rabble, of the mindless collective, Nietzsche’s ‘valley’. This is the logical extension of gender nostalgia at the fin de siècle – homophobia, misogyny, misanthropy, and an aristocratic disdain for the collective.

To return to the opening out of the beginning of this post, then, this place holds sway of its citizens by holding up to scrutiny, by displaying, demonstrating, what horrors befall the counter-hegemon - he is lost to a world of heartless vicious and cruel monsters that will not leave him until he is broken, limp with opium, emptied out, sucked dry. The operation of gender hegemony thus operates here like this: the fear of what lies outside is what holds men inside, keeps them safely at bay and insists on their allegiance to a simple but powerful creed: stand upright, be steadfast to the principles of inscrutable masculinity, hold onto your Herrschaft for dear life and watch out for those deadly sirens that will turn you any moment, calling calling, calling.

To refuse that hegemony, it seems, is to painfully twist and turn in the way of the underworld: come down with me, into the depths, into that place where Freud saw Lüger, in the darkest and most terrifying underplaces where we can tarry with the  monsters.

Marx and Beethoven: a fragmentary hagiography

To begin with, we must look for ruptures, gaps and mismatches since they are the markers of a certain kind of cultural work: the ego, according to both Freud and Lacan, papers over epistemological and ideological gaps, tries to hide them, rushes to fill them and this is the main mechanism of its ‘psychosis’:

In the ‘emancipated’ man of modern society, this splitting reveals, right down to the depths of his being, a neurosis of self-punishment, with the hysterico-hypochondriac symptoms of its functional inhibitions, with the psychasthenic forms of its derealizations of others and of the world, with its social consequences in failure and crime. (Lacan: 'Aggresivity in psychoanalysis')

This historicity of the ego, then, is our starting point. Its general function is to maintain the fantasy of a containment, a wholeness, a uniformity of the self; its various specificities are to be located in the ways in which that fantasy is held in place at the local level. What, then, are the cultural materials that the ego utilises to underpin the fantasy of its wholeness at the historical moment of Adolph Bernhard Marx’s Beethoven in his 1859 biography of the composer?

Certainly, the ego will encounter quite specific threats to its putative cohesion and in such cases must find a way of maintaining its strategic sense of wholeness: in this sense it functions as a balm or defensive suture. The gap, or ‘split’, we have encountered in this understanding of the ego, then, does a cultural work that I will henceforward term ‘ego work’.

In writings on music from the middle of the nineteenth century, discursive gaps can be read as markers of a certain anxiety about personality formation and are present either only by surreptitious intimation, as having already been papered over (and thus as traces of the ego’s healing work), or as cautionary, invoking the need for ego-work to be set in motion. Scott Burnham has shown how Marx was able to draw on the Beethovenian ‘heroic style’ as a resource in constructing a certain moral personality:

Like the great myths, the Beethovenian heroic-style sonata form assumes a place as one of Western culture’s master plots … The attachment of this particular musical-formal procedure to an ethical position severely alters the way in which other forms are viewed. As a particularly telling example of this, remember the way in which the Beethovenian sonata form acts as the crowning form in A. B. Marx’s Formenlehre: it is the motivating telos of his derivation of all other available forms … Marx’s pedagogical program enlists Beethoven’s music (and thus music in general) in the all-important agenda of Bildung, a process concerned primarily with the aesthetic and ethical development of self.

Burnham is undoubtedly right to draw attention to the centrality of the Beethoven style in Marx’s pedagogical agenda, but there is something missing here, I would like to suggest. The specificity of Marx’s reading of Beethoven, especially if one concentrates one’s scrutiny on the 1859 Beethoven monograph, is to be found as much in its construction of the Beethovenian figure at large as in the (anonymised, generalised) Beethovenian style.

The shift in my reading from style to figure might seem a conservative move, a nostalgic return, perhaps, to an heroic biography, or even a neo-liberal celebration of the individual as some kind of privileged site of cultural work: certainly, Burnham’s delicately drawn historiography points to some of the ways in which Beethoven’s style comes to be held at the level of a certain mentalité, a collective and anonymous discursive modality (‘Marx treats Beethoven’, so Burnham would have us believe, ‘as a Hegelian telos: only from the vantage point of the end of history can History begin’ ); yet what this reading misses here, it seems to me, is the prodigious materiality of the Beethoven figure itself, as avatar of a certain moment in the development of what Bourdieu has termed the modern habitus, the enacting of culture onto the body: this is a crucial moment in the sealing of the modern personality into that habitus when, crucially for our purposes here, the ego emerges as a kind of body-sense, functioning rather as a field that is folded onto the space occupied by the body – in this sense, the ego and the habitus are crucial agents in this moment of the history of Western bourgeois masculinity. Marx seems to grasp as much in his narrative of Beethoven’s ‘breaking out’ into the world, as a newly formed and powerful agent in it:

His build had become stocky, though not tall, thick set, full of vitality, a picture of strength; at that point illness did not yet seem to be an issue. His head was covered in bushy dark hair, that lay unkempt, more mane-like than curly; his forehead was broader and protruded all the more for being mounted above the darkness of his cagily receding eyes; his nose was strong and had developed a broadness rather than protruding, in German profile rather than the Roman profile of most artists’ noses. His mouth was well formed.

Marx constructed this description of the 25-year-old Beethoven as a pointed and deliberate contrast to the famous silhouette of Beethoven at 16 included in the Wegeler-Ries Biographical Notes.  Marx’s description of the younger Beethoven from that silhouette emphasises his ‘open profile’ with an ‘upturned nose’ and a light and ‘still undeveloped’ forehead.  What is at work here is a pointed exercise in the narrating of body-Bildung,  education through physical development, an enacting of the narrative of Bildung onto the habitus. A peculiarly German conception of personal development (although it finds many analogues in other cultures), Bildung has been characterised by Norbert Elias as ‘the inner enrichment, the intellectual formation of the individual, primarily through the medium of books, in the personality.’

This Bildung-narrative, as we shall see, is a crucial driver of Marx’s Beethoven fantasy; what is particularly interesting in this driver is the way in which Marx seeks, at certain isolated moments in the monograph, to shore up its effectiveness by making recourse specifically to the male body.

The pointed contrast between the two figures (the silhouette of Beethoven at 16 and Marx’s projected Beethoven figure at 25) is a material one, the difference between two technologies of representation: the earlier figure is referenced in relief, the silhouette tracing the outer markers of Beethoven’s personality; the later figure is imagined not in relief, but as an image available to the close scrutiny of the observer, such that the composer’s eyes give up their meanings under the protruding forehead, the mouth, well-formed, seems to work as a sign of health, and there is, as Marx stresses, no sign here of Beethoven’s coming illness.

This second image, at least, is fully legible. The technologies of nineteenth-century seeing, as Jonathan Crary has shown, were already under radical transformation by the late 1850s. Gustav Fechner’s Elemente der Psychophysik  published one year after Marx’s Beethoven monograph, had gone some way to, as Crary puts it, ‘[formalise] perception’ and ‘render the specific contents of vision irrelevant’.  Marx’s manner of ‘seeing’ here is in line with this formalisation, despite its heady romantic overtones and its commitment to ‘specific content’: in Beethoven’s forehead, the way in which it hides the eyes, in the well-formed mouth, and the racialisation of the artist’s German nose,  Marx’s image promotes a manner of seeing that draws on the logic of the modernisation of optics that Fechner seeks to achieve.

What Crary terms the ‘human sensorium’ here finds a parallel in the intensification of Beethoven’s subject-status, not as Subjekt, but as Versuchsperson, as one subjected to intense scrutiny.  There is thus a certain intensification of the look accompanied, paradoxically, by its disengagement; Marx’s ‘eye’ retreats from the scene of looking and the figure of Beethoven dominates, breaking into the narrative with a rude muscularity.  Beethoven’s physicality dominates, and yet that physicality marks Beethoven’s susceptibility as one being-looked-at, his objectification.

The two figurations of Beethoven at 16 and 25 also tell us something about the specifics of Marx’s engagement of the Bildung-narrative: the story of Beethoven’s stepping out, ‘into the world’ [‘in die Welt’] as Marx calls this second chapter of his monograph, is told through recourse to a conception of Beethoven’s personality development as proceeding along a predetermined trajectory. Indeed, throughout this section, Marx draws prodigiously on the well-trodden clichés of Beethoven’s complex and difficult character and is particularly keen to tie these traits and his physical attributes into the musical works as if all this should add up to a self-consistent narrative:

This contradiction of an apparent closedness combined with an openness of the mind to all true sentiments and inclinations is a predominant element of Beethoven’s character [that remained] from his boyhood, a sign of the deeply invested powerful and serious nature at work within him, which should be evident from the first works onwards.

Suzanne R. Kirschner has termed this tendency to oscillate between the local-personal and the longer-term conjoncture of the Lebenslauf or life trajectory the ‘romantic spiral’, drawing explicitly on older German narrative traditions that outline man’s estrangement from and higher reintegration back into nature.  In this sense, as Kirschner seems to suggest implicitly, the Bildung-narrative is a secularisation of the narrative of the fall from grace, rounded off with a neat reintegration, a kind of secular redemption. That secular narrative, in its most hegemonic form, calls into being fantasy figures whose progress is made to stand in for the progress of man at his most general towards that redemption.

Listening with Kafka: a barred exit

In 1914, three years after composer Gustav Mahler’s death, Kafka began work on a short prose fragment, which he completed some time in 1917 and to which Kafka’s editor Max Brod later gave the title ‘Auf der Galerie’.

Click here to see the fragment in German

Click here to read the fragment in English

I want to begin by addressin the fragmen's writerly-performative quality. The structuring of the text around two incompatible narratives works as a critical play on the epistemological groundedness of authoriality and subject positioning.

This critical pleasuring in the ambiguation of the authorial/narrating voice also engages at least two incompatible ‘types’ of masculinity: the ‘active’ (but, perhaps, deluded) masculine hero and the passive (but, perhaps, less deluded, less aggrandised) weeping observer.

The two paragraphs effect this duality through both narrative and indexical means: for Roland Barthes, the structure of narrative is usefully articulated through what he terms nuclei or ‘kernels’, events in the narrative that are crucial for that narrative’s cohesion – events that cannot be dispensed with if the narrative (or diegesis) is transposed from one medium to another; the index is a medium-specific operator that fleshes out the bones of the chain of nuclei through an accumulative action, grounding the diegesis in the medium of its telling.

What is significant here is the way in which Kafka attempts to subvert this functional duality (a duality articualted by Lukács as the difference between ‘Beschreiben’ and ‘Erzählen’, finding a useful complement in Jakobson’s ‘metaphor/metonomy’ duality ) by fundamentally integrating the telling of the diegesis into its writing: Kafka heaps writerly (medium-specific) indices onto the telling such that it is inseparable from its writing, inseparable from its qualitative grounding as a specific mediality.

This classically ‘modernist’ gesture – the intense medialisation of an apparently universally translatable ‘message’ – is also readable as a set of quite specific meditations on cultural agency, gender and the location of what David Schwarz has termed the ‘listening subject’.

The first paragraph plays out a hyperbolically ‘Freudian’ narrative of masculine agency. The father proxy in the ring must at all costs be vanquished by the young visitor in order to save (win) the suffering sexualised (consumptive) equestrienne from her brutalisation at the hands of the monstrous father.

The equestrienne stands as the cipher of Verkehr between the two men, a ‘transaction’ that helps mark the patrilineal and Oedipal ground of masculinity and the woman’s place in that transaction as Waaren (literally ‘goods’ or ware). The visitor is thus able to activate his masculinity by penetrating the membrane of the circle along a teleological vector; the trauma of this violent action is marked by a sudden (putative) silencing of the music with a shout of ‘Stop!’.

This shout, ‘durch die Fanfaren des immer sich anpassenden Orchesters’ (‘over the fanfares of the incessant accompanying orchestra’), rises above the degraded Alltagsmusik of the circus in order to figure the visitor as the bearer of a reproachful, ‘higher’, cultural counter-capital. Moreover, not only does the visitor traverse the boundary of the ring, but he ‘plunges’ into it: ‘stürzte in die Manege’ (literally ‘would tumble, fall or plunge’, continuing the conditional mood). This precipitous drop into the ring adds to the sense of trauma at the visitor’s incursion, which, within the Freudian logic that this paragraph sets up, is a hyperbolic (pathological) overstatement of the act of penetration.

The epistemological trajectory of this paragraph is underscored by the deployment of a range of figurations of sonic materials which draw on contemporaneous imaginations of the music/noise dualism. In this first paragraph, sound(/music) engages a complex array of tropes. On the one hand, it helps characterise the paragraph as ‘monstrous’ through the Orchestra’s cacophonous Brausen: incessant, it churns out stock fanfares, and the other noises generated my inhuman mechanisms – ventilators, steam hammers – are indexical expansions of the core image of a merely utilitarian (commercial) music.

On the other hand, sound functions as the sonic channelling of two opposing engagements of power – (i) the patriarchal monstrous brutilisation of the equestrienne marked by the Brausen and (ii) the traumatic ‘Stop!’ of the visitor – both marked by a character-giving utilisation of sound, accompaniment versus voice. In this duality of inside/outside, the first engagement of power is environmental in character, part of a circular, circumscribed ‘inner’ territory of degradation that locates the father proxy at that centre, wielding a range of masculine cultural resources that are simultaneously canonic (masculine strength, the driver of the action) and dissident (cruel, brutal).

Sound marks this territory by ‘accompanying’ the action, figuring it as a degrading sadomasochistic spectacle that can be ordered for its audience by the addition of sonic markers, like a perverse Hollywood narrative, accompanied by a ‘hidden’ post-Wagnerian orchestra.

The second engagement of power is a highly charged singular act of ‘sounding out’, carried on the voice, a mark of exemplary masculine subjectivity, but also the duplicitous bearer of a masculinity in crisis: vocal production can be seen at the fin de siècle as a supplement to the canonical mediacy (mediality) of writing where, as Sarah Webster Goodwin amongst others has shown, ‘voicing out’ draws attention to the sonorous body and is therefore dangerous in that it is grounded in the delicate body-physical, that privileged (and demeaned) site of the feminine in the nineteenth-century misogynistic imagination.

In Kafka this stands for an atavistic but ironic ‘recuperation’ of a model of masculinity lost in the great administration of the law, lost to the figure of the impresario mediator – voice as a last hope in the face of the brutalising anonymity of public masculinity, commercial culture, mechanised production.

But all this is not so.

Or so the next paragraph would seem to suggest. The sudden eruption of the indicative mood is traumatic: as Boa puts it, ‘the thudding syllables come as hammer blows to destroy the speculative edifice of a possible story’ and it is no accident that Boa should reach for the metaphor of hammer blows, resonating the ironic hyperbolic ‘Zarathustran’ masculinity of the first paragraph and thereby underlining the epistemological incongruity of the second with it.

This paragraph, by positing a second epistemologically dissonant version of events alongside the first, forces the narratee to rethink the reliability of the first paragraph fundamentally. It is thereby tempting to think of the story as presenting two realities, one false and one true, the first paragraph clearly a fiction, the second marked as ‘real’ by the indicative mood.

Yet this reading assumes a simple mapping of verbal mood to narrator reliability which, I suggest, is difficult to sustain in the light of Kafka’s use of language here: whereas the ‘truth’ of the first is questioned by the conditional mood and by the overblown heroism of the young visitor with its hyperbolic Freudian sexual circus, the second is called into question by the dream-like tone of the language: it is unfolded, almost as if in slow motion, in a long chain of clauses all of which relate back to a single grammatical subject - the adoring grandfather figure [‘der Direktor… vorsorglich sie auf den Apfelschimmel hebt… sich nicht entschliessen kann, das Peitschenzeichen zu geben… neben dem Pferd mit offenem Munde einherläuft…’].

This relay of clauses fixed to a single subject is a masterful writerly play on the German structuring of the clause around verb positioning, the closure of each link in the chain marked by the finite verb, heaping narrative action upon action to draw out the narrative line, and the narratee with it, towards an expected closure; but that closure is attenuated; the equestrienne takes her bow and, in the strange dislocated coda marked out from the rest of the paragraph by a hyphen, a characteristically dissident use of punctuation, the visitor to the gallery weeps ‘without knowing it’.

The beautiful strangeness of this ending, its pointed and studied ambiguity, brings one to rethink the simplicity of the unreality/reality dualism, and to call that binarism into question, to leave the boundary between the two porous.

As in the first paragraph, the content of the second is underscored by references to sonic materials, and, like in the first paragraph, those materials help flesh out a pointed juxtaposition of active and passive masculinities by recognising two kinds of sound – voice and accompaniment: however, it is the ringmaster that has ownership of the voice here, crying ‘English words of warning’, ‘exhorting’ the groom to be careful, and, like the visitor with his ‘Stop!’ of the first paragraph, he implores the orchestra to be silent.

The silencing of the orchestra here underscores the epistemological dissonance between the two paragraphs: in the first, the voice is owned by the visitor and engaged as a reproach to the banality and cruelty of the circus; in the second, the voice is commanded by the ringmaster, and is engaged to structure the audience’s (narratee’s) attention drawing it to his ‘kleine Enkelin’, the skilful equestrienne, by the silencing of the orchestra.

In the strange coda, moreover, the visitor sinks ‘in the final march as if into a heavy dream’, activating that commonplace trope of music as a place where subjectivity is lost, a place of dangerous and debilitating pleasures. The music operates here like a ‘sonorous envelope’.

There is a tendency in the post-Enlightenment Western European imagination of music to perceive it as a way of ‘transforming’ or temporarily suspending everyday modes of being, of moving beyond the mundane into a higher (or at least different) state of consciousness.

In Kafka, this tendency takes on an ironic or critical edge: the great post-Schopenhauerian articulation of music as a kind of narcotic is here blocked by the crossing and cancelling out of exit trajectories. One way leads to the ludicrous over-articulation of masculinity in the plunging thrusting ‘Stop!’ of the first paragraph by the (assumed) silencing of the music; the second leads to a debilitated, foreclosed masculinity, in which the music envelops the visitor and returns him to a womb-like state in which ‘crying without knowing it’ marks his infantilisation, an abject returning to the semiotic.

In both instances, the ‘way out’ is barred.

Beethoven's ears and the way of the man (ii)

The Q-b principle

In his repeated attempts to circumscribe and take ownership of this terrain, the Überhörer has not given up the ghost: in the last 30 years or so, tremendously acrimonious wars have been fought in the States over the terms and limits of the musicological terrain. In a rather hostile reader’s review of an early version of some of my work, for example, I was held to task for what he or she (the reader chose, understandably, not to reveal their name) took to be the overemphasis of the book on ‘theory’: ‘I would suggest that he streamline the theoretical sections of each chapter so that the author gets to the documents and the points more quickly’.

Of course, the point is an easy one to make and, to be fair to that reader, it was made about materials rather different to what I am writing oday. Nonetheless, the point could be said to be symptomatic of a commonly-held view from within musical scholarship that, in order to say anything interesting about music at all, one must ensure a certain downgrading of ‘theory’ and discipline it to the needs of the musical discourse.

The blasphemy I enact today is aimed precisely at this assumption for, in the end, the determination of the appropriate ‘balance’ of theory and musical discourse is simply a matter of how one draws the line between the two. I would go further even than this to say that one of the demands I want to make today is that we radically loosen the boundary between so-called ‘theory’ and musicology in order to open up the discourse to the kinds of dialoguing that, for some 15 years now, have been the bread and butter of other disciplines.

There have been, of course, a number of high-impact theory-cognisant publications in music, most notably, on the nineteenth century, by Rose Subotnik, Carolyn Abbate and Lawrence Kramer. And these have made an extraordinarily important contribution to the enriching and expansion of the field.

And yet, the (compounded) blasphemy that I want to commit here is to question whether, in the work of these scholars and others like them, the commitment to a certain (and for many, admittedly, already too lax) disciplinarity has not held them back from really testing what it is the discipline is all about, how it is constituted and what its limits might be, and the extent to which we should remain beholden to those limits. I don’t know the answer to this question, but isn’t it an interesting one?

And what if, contrary to the assertion made above, that questioning were to lead us into places we never imagined we could go? In another response to something I rote a lon time ago, another anonymous reader, less hostile, but equally perplexed by the work, suggested that the discipline just isn’t up to it: ‘Frankly’, he or she says, ‘I cannot see the point of publishing work that will be inscrutable to the majority of graduate students and professional scholars in its areas.’ If that reader is right, then we are indeed in a sorry state of affairs: is musicology so delicate that ‘difficult’ theoretically-charged writing has no place in our discipline?

Are we still so caught up in the kinds of disciplinarity that Adler so carefully laid out for us over 100 years ago as to foreclose the really tough ontological questions about our scholarships? I would like to suggest, rather, that the terms of this disciplinary fragility, the putative ‘limits’ to what its exponents are capable of, are by no means determinable in advance of their testing.

I teach and work in an music department in which all undergraduates are introduced to the core concepts of Althusser and Gramsci in their first year and in which Kramer, Adorno and Žižek are commonly set texts across the undergraduate curriculum; our graduate students deal as a matter of course with Lacan, Freud, Marx, Nietzsche, Bourdieu, Bhabha and poststructuralism, to name but a few, and are no less musicians and musicologists for it.

The assumption that the one excludes the other is the problem here, it seems to me, and it is an assumption I refuse to accept. In short, there is, then, something strikingly contemporary in the predicament of those nineteenth-century hegemonic thinkers on music who sought to police the boundaries of the terrain of musicology: perhaps, blasphemy of blasphemies, musicology really has only just begun to find ways of testing itself.

listening as a cultural-historical category (i)

I've always been fascinated by the meaning of listening, or rather the ways in which we take listenin to stand in for other things. The hysteric, the neurotic, the psychotic - in a sense these might be understood different kinds of listeners, different kinds of fans, different kinds of social pathology. In short, these three listeners constitute different economies of desire.

One of the core tropes that attends my thinking over and over again is that of listening, in both its metaphorical and literal meanings: listening as eavesdropping, as close scrutiny, as allowing space for someone to speak, as lending a sympathetic ear, as hostile aural scrutiny, as covert listening.

What strikes me in the juxtaposition of men and listening is that, in confronting the genderedness of their intellectual tradition, many men are particularly poorly placed to listen since their interests, as far as they are concerned, are best served by making as much discursive noise a possible. It is something of a cliché to note that men are poor listeners, and even more of a cliché to note that men like to talk about themselves.

Yet, at the level of the operation and wielding of public discourse, this is a particularly apposite characterisation of those public nineteenth-century masculinities that might be said in some to have workshopped the modern personality, cliché or no cliché. In this sense, listening is for those men something of a critical problem since, in the closely policed gender matrix of the nineteenth century, listening is densely gendered: masculine authority is invariably aligned with active engagement of the public space, and not with the kinds of interiority and melancholy distraction associated with new fixated listening that was all the rage in concert halls by the mid nineteenth century.

And yet, men did listen, attending public concerts in their droves, publicly displaying their pleasure at the music, never seeking in any way to hide that moment of consumption. So how does this square with the demands of public masculinity? How are we to read this alongside the clear anxiety that the public display of consumption occasioned?

It is my assertion that the answer lies not in some inadequacy of the materials or in a simple ‘misreading’, but in the very limits of the discourse itself: the way we theorise the relationship between what might be termed a theology of music and its socio-cultural practice is what causes this problem.

There are specificities in each of these discursive instances that will, by their vary nature, find different political articulations: part of the function of masculine culture in the long Austro-German nineteenth century is to maintain a radical distinction between theologies of music and the instance of music’s consumption.

It is for precisely this reason that I keep tryin to write from the subject position of a listener, as one who attempts to scrutinise closely and critically the ways in which men utilise discourse, and to focus carefully on both the internal logic of public claims made by men and the ways in which the ‘masculine’ language of public discourse nonetheless undermines that logic despite (perhaps because of) itself.

Listening to the way learned men spoke and continue to speak about themselves, their views on music and gender and their anxieties about their own worth, I am struck by the continuity between their various discursive positions and the intensity of their invective against threats to their world order, and it is in the intensity of the language, the excess of some of the ways in which men project themselves into public discourse, that one can open up inconsistencies in that public language, inconsistencies which often point to inner anxieties and equivocations about the exercising of their hegemony.

In so ‘listening’, one is often forced to take up a precarious subject position that is difficult to maintain without intense and continuous vigilance: to try to listen closely to these men and their various rages against the feminine, is to be in constant danger of collapsing into complicity with them, of succumbing yet again to a kind of careless communitarian misogyny by default.

Yet there is also a danger, as great in my view as the one I have just outlined, that one try to overcompensate for that first danger and thereby remain silent about the institutional misogyny of one’s intellectual and disciplinary forbears, remain quietly acquiescent to their assumptions and allow their testament to woman’s putative inferiority to be spoken unchallenged, its effects reaching quietly and insidiously into the present. Its names are many, but objectivity may well be one of them.

Beethoven's ears and the way of the man (i)

I return again to the beginning, to that strange fragment I encountered about 15 years ago penned by that strange and troubled man Adolf Loos in 1913.

I am speaking of the short fragment 'Beethoven's ears' Its theme, the decline of listening into a kind of undead consuming, figured through the transformation of the concert-going public’s ears into ‘Beethoven’s ears’, works as an avant-garde reproach tinged nonetheless with nostalgia: ‘they have something wrong with their ears now, they all have Beethoven’s ears. […] All their anatomical details, all their ossicles, labyrinths, drums, and trumpets, have taken on the diseased forms of Beethoven’s ears’.

The disease of the ears here could be understood as invoking not simply the classically modernist exasperation at the deadly atavism of audiences, that same issue dealt with ad nauseam by Arnold Schoenberg, Adorno and many others, but, and this is crucial here it seems to me, an attempt to transform that atavism into something akin to a sickness: in short, this is an attempt to somatise the generalising claims of conservative audiences and to make them, through reference to the body, highly particular, to render them local, and to undermine any claims they might make to speak for more than their own rather limited class interest.

This is a strategy that has an almost limitless application, but the body is specifically employed here (synecdochically presented here by the ear, the ossicles, the diseased inner canals) to afront the generality of middle-brow bourgeois taste with a discursive shock: the cultural effectiveness of middle-brow bourgeois culture is curtailed by its limitation to the tiny realm of flesh-for-flesh; as Scarry puts it, ‘those without power’ will have a ‘body made emphatic by being continually altered through various forms of creation, instruction and wounding’ (my emphasis), and this body marks a territory that contracts one’s sphere of existence, ‘down to the small circle of one’s immediate presence’.

Scarry’s extraordinary observation has run quietly but deliberately throughput much of what I think about ans much of what I write, and her observations on the power relations at work in the West’s disciplining of the body have proven extraordinarily useful. In short, this has been the way of hegemonic man: to shore up his precariously constituted power by carefully maintaining his monopoly on the public discourse, by limiting the feminine and other counter-hegemonic voices to the realm of the local, the body, and by seeking out and vilifying those mechanisms that seemed to undermine the effective operation of the contemporary gender machine.

For Loos, the body, flesh, especially that most delicate of orifices, the ear, operates as a metaphor for a masculinity curtailed. Whereas the complaint of a Wackenroder or a Hoffmann might have been that listening intervenes too overtly in the flow of discourse, for Loos, the loss of what we might term ‘virile hearing’, its ossification, marks rather a certain ambivalence to the relationship between bodies, virile venturism and the modern.

Although, one might argue, Loos’s particularly Viennese modality of modernism is one marked with a contempt for the crassly virile, it is nonetheless a virility that for him holds on to the possibility of some kind of radical masculine ideal of the effective, active: this is the duplicity of the Loosian moment which, on the one hand, is radical in its critique of the simple Hausherr and his attendant bourgeois Gemütlichkeit and yet which, on the other, nonetheless makes recourse to the kinds of conventional rhetorical strategies we encounter all over Wstern European witing on music – Loos explicitly reengages (whilst also problematising) the trope of somatisation in order to attenuate the masculinity that attends the male urban concert-goer.

That creature’s masculinity is a sickly and deviant one, touched by an unhealthy and deadly fixation on the mouldering ears of a dead hero, not his.

There is a striking echo of this sentiment sounded by the reluctant radical Heinrich Schenker in 1894 in his beguiling short essay ‘Das Hören in der Musik’ [‘Listening in music’]:

The greatest triumph, the proudest delight, in listening to a work of art is in raising up the ear to the same level [‘Macht’] as the eye. One need think only of a landscape, a broad and beautiful one, framed by mountains and hills, full of fields and meadows and woods and streams, full of all this, which nature creates in all its beauty and variety. And then one might climb to a place, where one can take in the whole landscape in a single look… In the same way, there is, somewhere above the artwork, a place from which one can see and hear from the spirit of the artwork all its pathways and goals, its dawdling and raging, all its variety and limitation, all its dimensions and relations.

Schenker’s figuration of the most ideal modes of listening as a studiedly quasi-Nietzschean pleasuring in the lofty isolation of what we might term the Überhörer, to bastardise Nietzsche’s other formation, is fuelled by a rage against the particular, the local, the piecemeal. In this rage against the metonym and the synecdoche, Schenker, like Loos, both engages the discourse of somatisation and refutes it: the Überhörer must enact a modality of being that is both a heightened physicality (listening that ‘sees’) and yet call for its annulment (this heightening, of course, is an unattainable ideal in the mundane body, so this Schenkerian ‘body’ must be somehow beyond the limitations of mundane fleshiness).

Whereas for Loos the listening audience is attached to a dead man’s ears, the mundane listener in Schenker is doomed to stay in the valley, weighed down by particularity, imprisoned in a body that will never fly.

Nietzsche’s take on the burden of listening is one which has clearly impacted on both of these figurative plays around the topoi and tropes of listening. In Also Sprach Zarathustra (first published in 1892), Nietzsche has the prophet Zarathustra recount a disturbing episode where he meets a group of ‘inverse cripples’ on a bridge over a fast-flowing river; the most terrifying of these creatures is the genius with a giant ear:

And when I came out of my solitude and crossed this bridge for the first time, I could not believe my eyes and looked and looked again, and said eventually: ‘That is an ear! An ear as large as a man!’ I looked closer and truly, under the ear something moved, something pitifully small, meagre [‘ärmlich’] and gangly [‘schmächtig’]. And truly, the monstrous ear sat on a small thin stem – but the stem was a man! With a magnifying glass to one’s eye, one could make out an envious little face and also, that a puffed up little soul was dangling from the stem. The people informed me, however, that the large ear was not just a man, but a great man, a genius. But I never believe the people when they speak of great men – I held on to my belief that here was an inverse cripple, who has too little of everything and too much of one thing.

The inverse cripple, then, and specifically the giant-eared genius, would seem on first reading to represent quite simply the burden of specialisation, a burden Karl Marx had made much of in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844).

It is, however, the strange and hateful envy displayed by the giant-eared genius here that opens up another reading, one more attune, perhaps, to the medico-political context in which this text was written: that ‘envious little face’, peeping out from underneath the giant ear works under the logic of what we might call, paraphrasing Slavoj Žižek, an obscene politics, in which, as we have seen, body and epistemology overlap, where the physical predicament is always already political, ideologically encoded onto the bearer of the animated cadaver, always inscribed (and continually re-inscribing) onto the fleshly limits of the self.

The estrangement or specialisation that would have been recognisable to Marx in this figure is an intensification or somatisation of the material domain where the body is made to stand in for the political territory, and that ‘envy’ draws our attention to their being something out of balance that is legible, availbe to scrutiny both for its victim (hence the envy) and its critics.

The obscenity of this micro-political encounter is grounded precisely in its consensual disdain for the imbalance, a primary mechanism, as we have seen, for the operation of hegemony: Zarathustra dismisses it an yet its victim is also fully cognisant of his own uncanny out-of-placeness.

Between Nietzsche, Schenker and Loos, then, there is a covert agreement on the nature of bourgeois listening: as a debased and amateurish practice that marks the man who engages it as fey, effete, distracted, impotent, listening is to be disciplined by a rhetorical return to the figure of an ideal, perhaps even Arcadian, body – the airy and light Überhörer, the clean body with new ears a long way from those fetid undead ears of Beethoven, a lofty refutation of the lob-sided ear-burdened genius from the mountain tops.

Attending all three of the negative figures of listening (the undead Beethoven-ears, the dilettante valley-dwelling listener, the over-specialised ear-burdened ‘genius’), there is a devastating haunting: the uncanny spectre that stalks the tradition is an ideal so abstract and yet simultaneously so fleshly as to confound the logic of the soma/psyche division. It is the very impossibility of man himself that haunts these figurations: he is open to contagion, fleshy, limited to the sphere of his body, yet yearning for a way of being in which that body might forever expand, spread itself over its terrain.