blah-feme

music, masculinity and the voice-identity relation

In any critical engagement with masculinity, attention to sonic materials will inevitably challenge the field of men’s studies as it has been constituted since the late 1970s: much of that field has consistently emphasized discourses grounded in the visual (descriptions of male bodies, of uprightness, steadfastness, of muscles, the fetish, the veiled and unveiled phallus/penis and so on) or discourses of control, power and ideology. And with very good reason: the field has had to constitute itself in this way in order to make sense of the dominant mechanisms by which hegemonic masculinity goes about reproducing itself across its numerous cultural fields. Only very recently, then, has it become possible to think about gender, and about masculinity in particular, as part of a broader sensory field in which ideologies are, to use Pierre Bourdieu’s term, ‘somatized’ (that is, embedded in the body such that externally held beliefs come to appear as if originating ‘from within’) and which therefore draw on all the senses to construe masculinity as both cause and symptom of the male sensorium. In this context, then, emphasis on sonic materials is radicalizing, not just because it disturbs the traditional emphasis on the visual, but also because it contributes to an enriching of the field of men’s studies by requiring full and critical attention be given to the ways in which men are construed as acousmêtres or beings in sound.[i]

            The relation among the terms ‘identity’, ‘voice’ and ‘discourse’ is best understood in the context of this new articulation, especially since the middle term, ‘voice’, brings the outer terms into a relation with the sonic which is not always granted to them. In particular, what thinking about voice in this context does is to enable the recasting of identities and discourses around notions of making and intervening in cultural meanings through and in sound. This is not something that many theorists outside of musicology have occupied themselves with until recently.[ii] This relation among the three terms, then, is one which makes claim to a radicalization in the name of sound.

            The term ‘identity’ in English has a long and complex history, reaching back at least as far as early modern usages. It has been connected consistently both to the idea of ‘sameness’ or similarity and to what we now might call ‘personality’ or ‘individuality’. Even in its most casual of contemporary usages that duality remains, both in terms of the idea of being like something and in actively seeking out (or having thrust upon one) a certain ‘like-ness’. In this sense, then, the question of identity, which has been much theorized in the European philosophical tradition and continental theory, is a question about relatedness, even when liberal discourses might seek to hide that connectedness in discourses about autonomy, sovereignty and so on. In the context of gender studies, identity has been placed under intense scrutiny, from Judith Butler’s now famous Gender Trouble in 1990 to recent more empirical accounts such as John Colapinto’s biography of David Reimer, As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl and Georgia Warnke’s controversial After Identity: Rethinking Race, Sex and Gender.[iii] The gender-identity complex is characterized for these scholars as an investment in thinking about the relationship between consciously-held views of gender and the more dispersed and culturally anonymous (but no less powerful) discourses that attend those views.

            The relation of the voice to identity is one characterized both by inclusion (where voice has been taken as an instance of identity formation) and mismatch (where voice appears to mark a remainder or a leftover ‘after’ identity formation). It is important, I think, to hold this twofold function in place because this is precisely how voice has come to be understood in our culture, both as the marker of a personality trait and as something ‘unto itself’, stubbornly uncanny. It has become, one might say, both symptom and fetish. There has been relatively little attention paid to voice (other than a few notable exceptions in cultural history and philosophy[iv]) and this dearth of attention has as much to do with the complexity of constituting the voice as an object as it is with any kind of widely held hostility to the voice in the contemporary mindset. It is that complexity, perhaps, which has left most theorists circling around a few small texts on the voice.[v] In the context of thinking about masculinity, there is much work to be done on the voice. ‘His Master’s Voice’, the voice of authority, and the ‘voice of reason’ are all instances of gendered imaginations of voice that operate according to the discursive restraints of hegemonic gender designations; and yet, every time scholars have tried to pin down the characteristic of voice as ‘gendered’, they are confronted with the uncanny exception that disturbs the field. It is precisely here, I want to argue, that thinking about gender is changed, in this encounter with voice as capricious, wanton, unto itself.

            It is in discourse that all this is held: in the statements that can and cannot be made about a thing; in the collection of possible statements which together constitute the discursive field of gender and of masculinity in particular.[vi] And it is discourse, therefore, that theoretical construct that Foucault made part of our everyday parlance yet again, that enables the kinds of analysis that disturb the everyday and estrange us from the mundane sameness thst voice refuses. What an emphasis on discourse enables us to do is to map out and determine the logic of statements that together hold gender designations together through an operation, as we have already seen, of somatization. That process whereby discourses become ‘embodied’ is precisely that process that I am interested in understanding. How, for example, is masculinity held in language? What kinds of statements attend it? How do those statements relate to one another? What are the logics by which one statement is deemed to belong to the discourse and another not? And, perhaps most crucially for our purposes, how do those logics come to feel natural?

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[i] This is a term we take form Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema, trans. and ed. Claudia Gorbman (New York, 1999) and Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York, 1995). An acousmêtre is a voice-character specific to cinema that derives its power from being heard but not altogether seen. The term is an amalgam of the Greek acousma, or ‘curtain’ from behind which Pythagoras is said to have lectured to his students, and être, ‘to be’ or ‘being’ in French. Although the voice character of the cinematic medium is a special case, one could argue, in fact, that, beyond the ‘voice-character’ itself, there is always some sense in which sound detaches itself from its source and in this sense, the relation of sound and character is always in some sense unstable. Hence, we might say, that we are always already acousmêtres.

[ii] See, in particular, Steven Connor, Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism (New York & Oxford, 2000) and Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More (Boston, MA., 2006). Also, with a specific focus on singing styles, but with much broader application, is John Potter’s Vocal Authority: Singing Style and Ideology (Cambridge, 2006). Of course there is a body of work produced under the banner of ‘acoustic ecology’ which, starting in the late 1960s, sought to understand how human beings (and, to a lesser extent, other sentient animals) use sound to mediate with their environment. See, in particular, Barry Truax, Handbook for Acoustic Ecology (Vancouver, 1978). It is striking that this body of work has not impacted on mainstream musicological methodology, other than in some ethnomuscologically-oriented work (see, for example, Steven Feld, ‘From Ethnomusicology to Echo-Muse-Ecology: Reading R. Murray Schafer in the Papua New Guinea Rainforest’, The Soundscape Newsletter, 8 (June, 1994): 9–13).

[iii] Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London & New York, 1990); John Colapinto, As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl (London & New York, 2006); Georgia Warnke, After Identity: Rethinking Race, Sex and Gender (Cambridge, 2008).

[iv] See: Michel Poizat, The Angel’s Cry: Beyond the Pleasure Principle in Opera, trans. Arthur Denner (Ithaca & London, 1992); Dolar, ‘Voice’; Dolar, Voice; Roland Barthes, ‘The Grain of the Voice’, in Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York, 1977), pp. 179–89; Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington & Indianapolis, 1988).

[v] Barthes’s ‘The Grain of the Voice’ is inevitably the key text at which most scholars outside the natural sciences begin. See also Guy Rosolato, ‘La voix: Entre corps et langage’, Revue française de psychanalyse, 37/1 (1974): 75–94 and Chion, Voice.

[vi] For a useful overview of recent developments in gender and discourse analysis, see Lia Litosseliti and Jane Sunderland (eds), Gender Identity and Discourse Analysis (Amsterdam, 2002).

mourning for the neighbour

this post now forms part of a larger article that will be published shortly

before the people, voice

[a raw version, unedited, of a paper delivered at Newcastle on November 25th, posted at Spurious's suggestion]

At the beginning of Voicing the Popular Richard Middleton asks of the British chartists’ 1848 proclamation “the voice of the people is the voice of God” the following question: ‘Where was this voce to be located, who owned it’? This question is what drives Middleton’s book and what, in classic Middletonian style, opens up an extraordinarily rich line of argument. My question today will be to ask, in manner indebted to Middleton, how the histories of the voice and the people are related. Is there a longue durée of the popular voice?

Is there any sense in which we might speak of that voice as having a history unto itself, as having a certain autochthonous agency, as engaging certain actions, as intervening even, in ways that are not imaginable in other contexts, other materialities, other medialities? Is the specificity of voice at all generalisable, available to the re-scaling of periods, epochs, trajectories? Is there a story to tell of the voice, a narrative that begins and unfolds. And, if such a narrative were tellable, if such a trajectory were traceable in the movement of history, is there anything we might recognise as a song of origins, beginnings?

For Virginia Woolf, beginnings are always about errors, and can only ever be the beginnings of a modernity that is sick; for Woolf,  that which is captured, taken down, made legible, is that which is modern, that which has fallen, been turned. In Anon, she speaks of a voice that emerges from the swamp, anonymous, empty. It is, in some sense, ready, prone and give itself up immediately to capture:

The voice that broke the silence of the forest was the voice of Anon. Some one heard the song and remembered it for it was later written down, beautifully, on parchment. Thus the singer had his audience, but the audience was so little interested in his name that he never thought to give it.

And so the story of literature itself begins, or so Virginia Woolf would have it: the voice in song breaks the ‘silence’ of the primordial forest, emerges, as it were, from the swamp and grounds literacy, (and, by implication, the origins of modernity itself); song is modernity’s beginning and its Other. For Woolf, then, the voice in song works to both found and ground writing (notation), to set it in motion; at the very moment when the voice breaks the ‘silence’ of prehistory, it has already fallen under the disciplinary sway of that scripture.

What is striking in Woolf’s modernist myth of vocality is its appeal to the voice in song as in some sense primordial or pre-linguistic: the discipline of that scribing, of making marks to record the apocryphal moment of modernity’s birth, is thus beholden to the moment of spontaneous oral abandon that precedes it and which works as its violent and disturbing Other – the violence of that discipline must batten down the spontaneity of that first abandon.

And it is not simply that the scriptural disciplining must attempt to overcome or overturn this Other (although it surely attempts to do this too): this pre-historical Other, the primordial birth pain of modernity, persists at the core of the Law of literacy, a persistence that Anglophone Lacanians like to term a “nugget of enjoyment”  and which, far from constituting just a potential undoing of modernity, is absolutely key to its continued operation, as something to which subjects can attach themselves, a materiality, a texture, a grit, mud, friction.

When, in Mrs Dalloway, the merest traces of that mythic voice is let loose into the urban cityscape of London, thousands of years after the apocryphal moment of Anon’s emergence from the forest, it is all the more intense, all the more debilitating for its acute incommensurateness with modernity into to which it is poured, and which it paradoxically grounds.

A sexless, ageless voice interrupts Peter Walsh’s misogynist ruminations on the ‘icy’ Clarissa  and the Woolfian articulation of the voice in song  as a kind of trace, a remainder out of place, as a staging of some first innocent jouissance; the woman singing felt it during that enchanted moment, so many years ago, when she walked, in May, with her lover. Her voice stages her expulsion from Eden, that moment when Law intervened in enjoyment. Woolf imagines Peter as someone caught up, ensnared in this nugget of enjoyment, this material that persists and persists, this grit, this friction. She has him imagine it as permanent, as formidably material beyond the reach of history:

Still remembering how once in some primeval May she had walked with her lover, this rusty pump, this battered old woman with one hand exposed for coppers, the other clutching her side, would still be there in ten million years, remembering how once she had walked in May, where the sea flows now, with whom it did not matter…

Other literary representations of the voice in song (Kafka’s 1914 short story, ‘Josephine the Singer, or The Mouse Folk’, Wordsworth’s The Prelude, Proust’s Memory of Things Past, Wackenroder’s essay ‘The Naked Saint’, Hoffmann’s The Golden Pot, and many others) situate the voice in song squarely outside the realm of history, of speech, of writing, as somehow always already struck out of the flow of discourse, an excess, but as a remainder, a stubborn stain, a mark, something that persists and yet, paradoxically, as something that has been and could again, any minute, be lost.

What also holds these disparate imaginations of the voice together is their commitment to an imagination of the voice in song as in some sense enchanted and enchanting (from the Lain root cantare, to sing and incantare, to incant). The enchantment, literally the ‘ensonging’, works for these disparate authors as a moment of epistemological uncertainty, but also, paradoxically, of raised or intensified consciousness: song interevenes in the flow of the everyday, changes things, puts the world out of sorts. In this sense, song might be said to have an agency all of its own; indeed we might say that the voice in song, for these authors, does cultural work.

It is here, then, that a certain story of voices (note my shift here into the plural) might be told; their longue durée might be traced in this notion of voices as doing cultural work, as , in some sense, agents, material incursions, textures, grits, frictions. The Woolfian narrative seeks to draw all voicings, especially those that enchant, transfix or undo, to a singular utterance before all utterances. Its singularity, its radicalising incursion into the silent forest, the radical impossibility of its recuperation is what gives it its force. Popular and traditional musics from Europe and North America abound with origin myths of the singular voice: born on the air, the first seduction, the first calling, the first turning, this interpellation before all interpellations – this voice above all is cherished as the site on which is built the edifice of the vernacular utterance. It is a voice that presents itself as always already lost, as the greatest of all losses, an unknown, silent and mythical voice, before all voices, the first sigh, the first murmur, the first quiver.

The point I want to make about the apocryphal voice here is that, despite its mythical reverie of origins, born out of an atavistic theology of singularities, it is historically quite specific, or, at least, shows itself to be sufficiently malleable to emerge again and again as constitutive of modernity itself: with each intensification of the technological rationalisation of the forces and means of production, this singularity emerges again to sing of loss, to recount the end of days.

Vernacular song traditions from around the advent of recording technology all engage in an intensified discourse of mourning for lost voices: in fado and flamenco traditions, for example, the advent of recording technology marks a particular shift in their conditions of dissemination and reception. For both traditions, certainly, this was the period of rapid urbanisation, and the period in which both musics appeared for the first time on the commercial urban stage: Fado’s revistas (reviews) & casas do fado and flamenco’s cafes cantantes and peñas flamencas.

The period in which the impact of commercial recording begins to make itself felt is also the period in which these traditions become fixed, held in place by the discipline of the new technologies: certainly, the earliest recordings are akin to field recordings, but the first commercial recordings (from the mid-1920s after the advent of electronic recording) already reference these earlier recordings as somehow magically charged mananciales de nobre (noble sources) fuentes de sueños duros, as if to suggest that the slightly later recordings were mere faded traces of an earlier ‘golden’ practice. The nostalgia industry gets to work extraordinarily quickly in this context. [Adorno: ‘Nadelkurven’]
In the early commercial recordings of fado and flamenco, moreover, record labels seem to be attempting first of all to ‘naturalise’ the technology of recording which would have been marked as undoubtedly ‘new’, as implicated in industrial processes ‘alien’ to the two traditions: We can see this ‘naturalisation as working in two distinct ways

•    naturalisation by referencing the pre-history (i.e. recording already belongs to this tradition)
•    naturalisation by utilising advances in that technology to elide the technology – commercial electronic recordings appear as early as 1927

Clearly then, these discourses on flamenco and fado are already touched by the dissemination of certain kinds of objects – recordings. Whilst these objects are not readily mappable onto the psychoanalytic object, they do change the symbolic dynamic in some striking ways. The playwright and folklorist Frederico Garcia Lorca referred to the gramophone as early as 1920 as a kind of tecnología mentira de la escritura [false technology of writing] and Adolfo Salazar, documenter of the famous 1922 concurso de cante hondo refers to the technology of recording as un arañar violente [violent scratching].

Clearly, for both commentators, recording technologies constitute an unwelcome intervention in flamenco practices. A strikingly similar discourse can be seen in the reception of the famous fadista of Lisbon Adelina Fernandes who, having signed to HMV’s Portuguese franchise by the late 1920s, her albums outselling anything else in their catalogue, was nonetheless ridiculed by puristas and connoisseurs as unspeakably commercial.

In both the flamenco and the fado context, furthermore, recorded objects seem to have created an ‘imaginary’ loss,  - the great voices of the tradition before recording are now lost forever since they cannot now be recorded: nostalgia, in this context, as a condition of this modernity, seems to have emerged here  as a response to the  very technologies that shape that modernity: this is a common trope in recent scholarship on trauma and in this context, it is the displacement enacted by recorded objects on the popular imagination of the locatedness of the tradition in specific places, specific cultural spaces that is crucial to my reading of this nostalgia work: recording technology intervenes in a these musical cultures’ imagination of themselves.

This loss out of capture, this reaching back into a lost space before capture was ever possible, is, in a crucial sense, then, constitutive of modernity. When Middleton asks who owns the voice of the people, he is asking about the very terms on which modernity constructs political agency. The terms of that agency, its complex mediation and distribution across a number of medialities and cultural fields, are inextricably linked to the necessity for a grit or friction in the system that gives traction.

In my crudest Lacanian terms, the apchryphal voice of Anon must always stay lost, and its evocations, however fulsome or ‘authentic’ must always remain enchanted, incomplete, since to capture it fully, would be to bind it too consistently into the symbolic order, and to smooth out all its surfaces, to seamlessly reintegrate it into the flow of discourse, to absorb it and leave nowhere for subjects to bind themselves to it. To invert a commonplace wisdom about collective agency, for a Lacanian, voice must always precede the people.

listening over Mahler

I have been listening to Mahler. This usually means something, for his is a music that does not give itself up very often. Many use him as muzak, as a kind of everymen’s background pain, ambient suffering, the soundtrack to a bleached and tired film noir, or a strained little ensemble piece. Listen, watch and learn – this is culture, so they would have us say.

But this is all wrong, all skewed, all nailed down. Mahler’s is a music that can be used but always only in so far as it leave a large and untameable excess, a musical core so of itself, so self-referring, so ontologically heavy, as to refuse re-positioning into other material contexts. It is almost as if to listen is to mishear already.

What glorious ambivalence, what fabulous disengagement, what studied performativity. His is a music of all musics, a rite, a passing all laid out in self-conscious self-erasing textuality. Its very textiness, its very self-unravelling attracts to itself a certain counterweight, a certain materiality that will not rest at that: it is materiality as material, music as music a grand and beautiful tautology, There is no air of literature, no Friedensode, no dark heart of absurd black, but just the unravelling of the symphony, a poetics of grand, stately, noble and beautiful entropy.

Much has been made of his fragmentary, open-ended nature: his is like a thousand voices, like a polyphony of voices, a clambering for attention. But this fragmentary nature is not about plurality, not about the multitude, but about the hopeless ideal of music for music. Mahler’s of all musics is the most autonomous.

The politics of my enjoyment, then, of my straining to make sense, to break through its shiny and kitschy surface, is a politics of agonising incomprehension. No way in, no way out. It is.

Like a nugget of hard refusal, a lump of void stuff, a heavy, heavy sounding tumult of uniformity, it sits, unwelcome, closed, bitterly foreclosed.

Pa pa pa pum, Pa pa pa pum, Pa pa pa pum…….

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.

Mahler and Strauss

[extract from my forthcoming book]

It is clear (or, at least, intensely apparent) that bodies are the sites of discourse. This is amply demonstrated at the Habsburg twilight by the proliferation of theses on pathology, disease, gender and sexuality, which concentrate their energies on the fleshly; they constitute a powerfully overdetermined focusing of discursive activity on the body. Whilst it is certainly the case that the Habsburg fin de siècle deals with the body in ways deeply indebted to a long and vigorous humanist tradition of the body, the particularity of the re-figuration of that tradition is what concerns us here: how did the new sciences of the body circumscribe the public experience of Mahler’s body? And how did public debates about the body and its appropriation frame Mahler’s private figurations of his own body? To attempt to answer this last question is no simple matter: unlike many of his contemporaries, Mahler has left us very little of the usual material for biographical speculation – no diaries, no memoirs, very little in his letters as to the way he saw himself, his oeuvre or his milieu. This chapter will thus attempt to think through the problematic of Mahler’s body as an historical object of analysis by scrutinising some of the contemporaneous literatures (fiction, psychoanalysis, medicine) that help form a cultural currency of the body, and will employ a series of interpretative strategies that centre on Mahler’s body as an agent in the formation of that currency.

Mahler’s body, it seems, was a deviant body: in the late nineteenth-century (racio-)criminological mind, there is an unbroken continuity from the deviant bodies of prostitutes, harridans, perverts, homosexuals, criminals, through to the bearers of sickness, the insane and ‘lower’ racial types such as the Hottentot, the Negro and the Gypsy; the Jewish male body is similarly marked in the raciological discourses of the time by its physical ‘inadequacy’ and deviant genus. As we shall see, it is a crucial determining inclination of Viennese raciology to read the surfaces of bodies and their morphology as bedeutsam (‘meaningful’) of their Charakter (‘character’) or Gattung (‘species’). The inclusion of the Jewish body amongst the other ‘deviant’ bodies is grounded in a logic of marginalisation through embodiment: this structural trope identified by Elaine Scarry in The Body in Pain is strictly binaristic. Her most useful observation for our purposes is that one encounters in a range of literary sources from the fin de siècle a tendency to juxtapose the seamless, ‘light’ and ‘invisible’ body of hegemonic masculinity with the intensely visible and over-signified fleshly bodies of its deviant Others. Something of this alteritous formulation is captured in a short diary entry made by that most eloquent of witnesses to the Habsburg twilight, Franz Kafka, in 1914, three years after Mahler’s death, in which he observed two men in a room in the building opposite his window:

29 July. The two friends, one of them blond, resembling Richard Strauss, smiling, reserved, clever; the other dark, correctly dressed, mild-mannered yet firm, too dainty, lisped;

This striking duality, one that Sander Gilman has also recognised in the Mahler/Straus juxtaposition, is a telling addendum to Scarry: not only were hegemonic masculinities characterised by their ‘lightness’ but they were also marked by a comfortable physicality (‘smiling, reserved, clever’). The overdetermined embodiment of the Other of that comfortable physicality, the thin, dark, slightly fussily dressed, ‘too dainty’ masculinity of the ‘smart Jew’ (or any smart Other), is achieved – unlike Scarry’s British colonial examples of the overdetermined healthy bodies of, for example, ‘black’ men – through a sickliness or over-articulated counter-physicality: it is in the Other that the body seems to be under a kind of malevolent erasure, not in the wielders of discourse, as in Scarry’s model. If we nonetheless accept Scarry’s thesis that ‘those without power’ will have a ‘body made emphatic by being continually altered through various forms of creation, instruction and wounding’ (my emphasis), and that this body marks a territory that contracts one’s sphere of existence, ‘down to the small circle of one’s immediate presence’, we must also recognise the specificity of the Austro-German imagining of the duality in the slenderness and wistful cerebrality of the Jewish Other and the healthy physicality of the hegemon. The ‘wounding’ that Scarry so eloquently outlines is manifest here in an internalised (racial) mark of difference: the Jew is marked out as suffering from (wounded by) its peculiar ontogeny, from its very biological givenness. The urgent problem for a public male Jew like Mahler was not how to attempt to acquire the comfortable public physicality of the hegemon, but how to erase or somehow challenge the bodily impediment (of the sickly Jewish ‘intellectual’ body) to the wielding of public cultural power. The consequences of Scarry’s theory of embodiment are far-reaching, but of usefulness in this context only if modified slightly: whilst intense representation (embodiment) can function as a way of regulating the symbolic meanings of bodies, which stand outside the hegemonic physicality of ‘upright’ bourgeois propriety, that embodiment can work as a kind of pathologisation and ‘thinning’ rather than as a thickening of the physicality of the racial Other.

At the Habsburg fin de siècle, one certainly encounters a range of body types that are wilfully and consistently marginalised from dominant discourses, thereby safeguarding the putative ‘normality’ of certain forms of military, bourgeois and public masculinities. The deviant bodies are often marked by their racial difference and, as we have seen, the Jewish male body stands as an exemplar of the dissidence of ‘non-German’ masculinities. Like Kafka’s huge (baby-)father in the Das Urteil, the upright male body of the empowered Austro-German hegemon is a highly discursive graphism (an emptied ‘shape’ or shell) that can expand itself to cover an inordinate amount of cultural space and, like the Kaiser-figure in Heinrich Mann’s ironic novel Der Untertan, that hegemonic graphism is empty, unfettered by deviant ‘character’ and has ‘no limits on [its] extension out into the world’ despite (perhaps because of) its fleshly physicality. To use Deleuze and Guattari’s term, it is a completely deterritorialized body. For the Jewish body, conversely, it is the perception of its very particularly embodied ‘character’ (its thin, spindly awkwardness) that marks it as an impediment to the experience of and pleasuring in cultural space. As we shall see, the anxiety about space finds particularly powerful expression in German-Jewish literature from the period and has been linked by Deleuze and Guattari to Kafka’s notion of a ‘minor literature’. The attempt to disrupt that impediment, the strategic dislocation of the body (as a kind of internalised flesh(l)y ghetto) from Jewish male creativity, a strategy followed with zeal by Mahler, Kafka, Brod, Werfel, Buber and other German-Jewish intellectuals from the long fin de siècle, is a crucially assimilationist project, and one which, as we shall see, finds resonance in Kafka’s view of writing and Mahler’s view of composing.

looking awry during Shotakovich

She and I together, side by side in the geat hall. Norse Goddess and I. Knowing each other, sensing each other, understanding...

She sits in regal calm, engaged by Shostakovich, taken up by him. She says 'this experience has broken me since ... and I am waiting to rebuild myself'. The music gets into her, makes her work on herself, makes her suspend it all and put it back together afterwards.

I am jealous. Or I think I am (or ought to be) - obviously this music hurts her and puts her in danger. I want to help, I want to be the balm that heals, but she wants that burning - it nourishes in ways I cannot imagine.

Music leaves me always just weaker (what is the status of that just? and why do I listen?). It murders something within. Shostkovich is particulaly deadly for me. I never listen to it, but I know it, and it knows me - it always finds me...

I wish the hurt that it worked on me were more, were real, were something beyond my failure to feel what it is or might be. She is so real, so vital: she feels in ways I can only imagine. If I could only have one part of that, one part of that intensity, that mind that refuses to leave its body alone, that refuses to give in to the pressure to reason in a vacuum, that seeks out the most dark and beautiful questions. What she feels is what I have always failed to feel.

Norse Goddess and I together, side by side, in the Great Hall, having ourselves brutalised by him.

For both of us, I can only guess, it is the weakness of those materials, their glorious failure, that is so deadly. For her it seems to undo, disolve, disturb and damage. For me it brings me one day closer to the inevitable end when I achieve complete ideological compromise

Death and I and she and he.

To be replete as she... that would be to be

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.