Here is the short talk I gave for the online launch of Rancière and Music (ed. João Pedro Cachopo, Patrick Nickleson, and yours truly, Edinburgh University Press) in 2020. Speakers for the launch were Tamara Levitz, Jacques Rancière, and the editors. Thanks to Carol McDonald and Naomi Farmer from EUP!
As since my earliest engagements with Rancière’s work, I continue to be moved by a notion like, as expressed at one point in Aisthesis, ‘the little scene that suffices to sum up a world’, and thinking about what kinds of scenes can do this kind of work under what kinds of perspectives, and what kinds of worlds are summed up. Can any scene suffice? That would seem to cut against the idea that politics occurs only rarely, but perhaps that’s the point: that the potential for politics is always present, but that it is a rare occurrence for the enactment of political potential to actualize, even briefly.
I think there are profound implications here for a ‘politics of musicking’ that have nothing to do with ‘political music’ or other outward-facing political valences (absolutely crucial as these may be). I’m still wrestling with what these implications are, but they’re built somehow into some other Rancièrean phrases—the ‘logic of action’ described in this same passage from Aisthesis, for one. I’m particularly interested in improvisational interactions in different kinds of music-making contexts, and of course the improvising musicians themselves, most of the time, continue to constitute what I call ‘musicology’s poor’, functioning, often more or less namelessly, in the service of ‘the composer’, ‘the work’, ‘the performance’ and so on, consigned to a role but always holding the potential to transcend that role or to imagine, and enact, it otherwise.
Here are three ‘little scenes’ from among countless possibilities in Rancière’s texts – each of which opens onto a lively range of potential ways to engage what it is that happens when people make music together:
(1) from Names of History, the poor ‘moving outside their place, by leaving the great regularities of their objectification in order to fragment and dissolve themselves into subjects who speak'.
(2) from Rancière’s interview with Sudeep Dasgupta, ‘Emancipation would be about creating for themselves a new body, a new lived world’.
(3) from ‘Democracy, Republic, Representation’ the locating and recognizing of the common of the community, ‘separated from the sole logic of relations of authority immanent in the reproduction of the social body’.
As a music theorist, this makes me think of possibilities of musical relations prior to established logics of reproduction (why these harmonic/melodic relations, why these rhythmic structures, why these features of music posited as primary and others as secondary, and on and on).
But I think turning to the embodied, affective interactions of musicking humans is more than a matter for arcane music analysis, because I think these contexts provide valuable windows for understanding a great deal about human interactions much more broadly, and about how our subjectivities are drawn through our interactions. As these three brief quotes I’ve alluded to—again three among countless contenders!—suggest, Rancière’s work has a great deal of as-yet untapped for thematizing how to move from the scene of musical interaction outward to the world summed up. This is taking on an especially relevant tenor in this quite thrilling and frankly terrifying moment we’re in in tertiary music teaching and learning, where on one hand it’s becoming increasing apparent what some of us have been trumpeting for a very long time, that music studies’ whiteness, maleness, colonialist-ness, composition-ness, formalist-ness, has long outlived the historical epoch in which as a discipline it could get away with these various chauvinisms, but on the other hand is being impinged upon more than ever by neoliberal accountability schemas and countless other insidious forces.
So that’s how I’m using Rancière’s work—to work from the inside out, from the laboring, often anonymous, interacting bodies of musicians and their posthuman instrumental prostheses to find new ways of acting and new ways of asserting their status as political beings in the first place. Can this lead to new forms of activism? I’m not so sure, but a little utopian streak in me still clings to a quote from John Szwed that I cite in my chapter in Rancière and Music: the implications of jazz’s particular brand of collectivism ‘are profound and more than vaguely threatening, for no political system has yet been devised with social principles which reward maximal individualism within the framework of spontaneous egalitarian interaction’. Or Rancière, citing Théophile Gautier in Aisthesis: “A pantomine is ‘like a symphony in which each person follows his dream through the general design’.” I’ll stop, then, with Gautier’s enticing words…