by Mark G. So
21 September 1999
Written during the seminar 'Gendering Performance' (Music 172), taught by Dr. Katherine Hagedorn at Pomona College
Susan McClary writes, "musicology fastidiously declares issues of musical signification to be off-limits to those engaged in legitimate scholarship. It has seized disciplinary control over the study of music and has prohibited the asking of even the most fundamental questions concerning meaning" (Susan McClary, "Introduction: A Material Girl in Bluebeard’s Castle," Feminine Endings, 1991, p. 4). McClary takes-off from this observation towards a feminist musicology, one that she proposes should be grounded in a semiology of musical signification. Such a project would examine the social significance of musical forms, analyzing the processes through which social meaning is passed across the very "syntactical procedures and structural conventions" (31) around which music is formally organized, and "explaining how it is that certain images or responses are invoked by particular musical details" (20). McClary proposes that the sheer absence of any critical discourse about musical signification requires that a critical conversation about music in general be established within the discipline of Music, upon which a feminist musicology may then be grounded; she states, "before we can address … questions concerning gender and sexuality …, it is necessary to construct an entire theory of musical signification" (20). However, the stage which McClary sets may not be the most conducive to the development of critical interventions that benefit either her own particularly vested feminist interests or those of any other community of action seeking more effective means of battling dominant social structures in music. I intend to show how McClary’s formulation of a critical semiology of musical signification, while not ostensibly formalist, problematically recirculates the notion that the study of a cultural imagery on its own formal terms is its proper study – the chief principle underpinning any formalist program. Founding a feminist musicology upon such a formalism is counterproductive at best. At worst, it reproduces structures through which oppressive agendas currently operate, and through which they may insidiously continue to operate.
I wish to propose that any critical ideology seeking to counteract forces of oppression must strike at the guarantee that legitimates discourses of authority – the guarantee of the object of study. An all-out assault must be launched against the ability of a discourse to present its interpretation of a given thing as more or less truthful based on the degree to which the interpretation has integrated ‘tracers’ – organic components, formal aspects, ‘self-evident’ concrete facts – of the thing in question. This is a tall order, given that cultural forms are precisely that – forms. As such, they have an undeniable presence which is non-ideological. Nevertheless, as signs, i.e., to the extent that they have meaning, cultural forms are, to invoke Stuart Hall’s terminology, floating signifiers. It is only through a complex discursive process that the substantial, concrete presence of a form can be grafted into its textual significance to give it the illusion of having fixed meaning. Formalist discourse serves as an apparatus for such a construction. Formalism depends upon the notion of a hermeneutic link between the object of study and its interpretation in discourse. In other words, formalism is premised on the idea that the meaning of the object as a text made to signify within a given interpretive frame is to greater or lesser extent derived from what is understood to be the ontological meaning of the object itself. I want to deny this hermeneutic construction as fundamentally oppressive, responsible for the fixing of hegemonic meanings which historically have been misogynist, racist and classist. I want to deny, in short, that the object itself has any significance whatsoever. I want to claim that all meaning is constituted at the level of the object as a text, and that the formalist claim to the source of meaning in the essential aspect of the object is pure mythology. I make this claim not on the grounds of evidentiary observation; to do so would be to re-inscribe the very paradigm which I endeavor to deconstruct. Instead, I make it on the grounds of a radical politics which recognizes a distinct utility in the breakdown of hermeneutic ways of knowing. Patriarchal, white supremacist, capitalist social structures are maintained through the discursive fixing of meaning via a hermeneutic formalist model. Attacking the guarantee of the object by exposing it as purely a matter of the interpretation of textual significance disables the fixing of meaning. Thus, the discursive fixing of meaning can be viewed as a profoundly hegemonic project. It then follows that a feminist or otherwise radical critical intervention in the perpetuation of dominant formations should be deeply invested in the contestation of fixed meaning.
Yet, it is precisely a hermeneutic model of understanding which Susan McClary forwards in her call for a semiology of musical signification. Any semiology, be it iconology, ethnology, or musicology, has underlying it the guarantee of the concrete ‘thing itself.’ It is thus fundamentally formalist. The gist of my argument thus far is that a more radical approach to theorizing meaning establishes the following: (1) all meaning is constituted in the interpretation of textual significance, and (2) the concept of an ontological meaning, inherent to the object, which interpretation mediates to greater or lesser extent is purely mythic. Bringing the discussion back to music, it therefore follows that, while writing about music is always interpretive, it is no less so when dealing with music ‘on its own terms.’ Equally, the performance of music – indeed, ‘music-ing’ about music – is no more appropriate a means of understanding music than speaking, dancing, laughing, dressing or cooking about music. No interpretive methodology can run closer to or farther from musical meaning because the disembodiment of musical significance from musical forms themselves handily does away with the hermeneutic paradigm and along with it, the pretense that the object has any meaning in and of itself. The interpretation of musical meaning is no longer a matter of distance vis-a-vis the music itself; rather, it becomes wholly reflexive of the political position or agenda from which an interpretation is deployed. The governing principle of signification is thus shifted from fixed meaning to unfixed meaning. This is what we are left with when we dismantle the guarantee of a formalist argument.
I consider it necessary to have opened my discussion in this way because I feel that this gap in Susan McClary’s argument is not a mere subtlety but rather a problem of crucial significance. I have thrown it open precisely because it tends to remain hidden from view in McClary’s prose. It exists as a dynamic which operates more or less insidiously against the grain of McClary’s feminist agenda, yet rarely interrupts the flow of her reasoning. For this reader, the problem did not stand out clearly until nearly the end of the chapter, where McClary’s extended reference to Theodore Adorno and the Frankfurt School finally brought the issue into sharp relief. Even in this instance, McClary’s navigation of formalist rhetoric is not uncomplicated, and we need to ‘strain to see’ in order to get at a clear understanding of the problem. But I emphasize that splitting this hair is a worthwhile venture insofar as it will allow us to recognize the threat posed by McClary’s pseudo-formalist rhetoric to her radical cause and inform a later consideration of possible modifications to her proposed methods that could make for more effective interventions.
McClary’s rather uncritical embrace of Adornoan Frankfurt School thinking in the section of her essay mentioned above is highly significant in that it exposes a particular naiveté about the role of Adornoan thinking in the perpetuation of formalism through the recent music historical discourse. Adorno and his aesthetic theory of the autonomous cultural superstructure have been appropriated by many a music historian in recent scholarship, including Carl Dahlhaus and Lydia Goehr, to name but two whose writing I have lately encountered. I should now establish that the theory of autonomy holds that systems of cultural forms arise as products of social and economic forces through a complex fetishism or ‘structural mystification,’ to use Adorno’s terminology, and that since those systems operate somewhat independently, they must at least in part be understood on their own terms. Dahlhaus invokes the theory of autonomy right at the outset of his Nineteenth-Century Music. He writes, "a history of art which is not at the same time a history of art – that is, one that bypasses aesthetic interpretation in favor of documentary interpretation, or vice versa – falls wide of the goal of any music history with a claim to be more than a collage pieced together from composers’ biographies, concert guides, and cultural-historical panoramas" (Carl Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, Berkeley: UC Press, 1989, p. 7). He thus affirms one notable implication of Adorno’s theory – that one can speak of art as having its own formal or aesthetic history which is independent from, though relative to, the socio-historical context of its production. Goehr’s debt to Adorno consists of her claim to the ultimately formal, ‘intrinsic meaning’ of music and its consequent autonomy from the sphere of social reification, which, she argues (in typically Adornoan fashion), allows it the freedom to express the ‘truth’ about society in a given historical moment, unbound from society’s oppressive ideological constraints. She promotes the examination of "the [musical] works themselves," lest we should end up skimming the shallows of the merely "metaphorically musical" (Lydia Goehr, The Quest for Voice: Music, Politics, and the Limits of Philosophy, Berkeley: UC Press, 1998, p. 46). [It is noteworthy that both of these recent Adornoan music histories rolled off the University of California Press, as it is largely through the efforts of Martin Jay and his associates in the UC system that Frankfurt School criticism has been rehabilitated in the American academy since the 1970s (Goehr’s acknowledgments even mention Jay by name)] (For a compact history of theory in the 20th century which traces the development of the Frankfurt School and many other intellectual, social, and political movements, please see Norman F. Cantor’s Twentieth-Century Culture, NY: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 1988).
Both of these examples serve to demonstrate that, contrary to McClary’s claim that Adorno’s theory offers a "way of getting beyond formalism" (McClary, p. 29), the theory of autonomy has been used by music historians to precisely the opposite end. It is possible to account for this confusion by considering the great degree to which Adorno and the Frankfurt School have been painted as radicals by contemporary sociology and literary criticism. It is important, however, to recognize the theory of autonomy not as enabling the analysis of the social function of cultural forms but as eschewing it. In fact, Adorno himself invoked the theory of autonomy as a direct means to avoiding functional analysis. It is in a revival of Adorno’s own use of the theory of autonomy that music historians in recent years have managed to perpetuate practices of strictly formal evaluation while at the same time claiming to be doing critical analysis of a radical Marxist sort. It is absurdly ironic how far the common name association of Adorno with radicalism has been extended in the musical academy! McClary writes that in Adorno’s view, "music…becomes the most sensitive social barometer in all of culture" (28). This is true on a certain superficial level. However, Adorno’s argument hinges on the claim that music’s formal organization is historically conditioned. Thus, Adorno posits the meaning of music against the concept of its social and political overdeterminacy. He sees the meaning of music and other cultural forms as linked to traces of history captured in and expressed through their formal structure, and exactly not as the production of the discursive interpretation of significance. In such a way, Adorno re-inscribes (temporally-) normative forms, if not absolutes (For an elaborate critique of Adorno’s theory of aesthetic autonomy, please refer to Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde, Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1984). McClary’s collusion in this sort of formalism becomes evident with her assertion that the "task facing a music critic who wants to find the traces of history in musical texts is to discover alternative modes of historiography" (McClary, p. 28). I have already discussed how the hermeneutic model invoked here uses ‘traces of history’ to fix meaning and thereby counteract McClary’s feminist project. The formalism of McClary’s proposed methods is finally all-but-stated outright when she declares, "for the study of music, music itself remains the best indicator, if we only permit ourselves to listen self-reflexively and to think" (32).
* * *
In her introduction to Feminine Endings, Susan McClary wants to convince readers that music encodes meanings pertinent to the social formation of gender and gendered selves, and at this she certainly succeeds. However, her attempt at a feminist intervention in musicology is, as I have argued, problematic at best. Her persistence in applying the formal analysis of musicological inquiry in her paradigm is a dangerous retention of discursive strategies designed to fix meaning. As I have argued, the fixing of meaning runs counter to a feminist agenda – and to any other radical project, for that matter – because it effects an elision of the political and social overdeterminacy of the meaning of cultural forms as signs and enables a discourse to legitimate its interpretation on the authority – or guarantee – of the object of study itself. The fixing of meaning is thus an operation which exclusively serves the obfuscation of political agenda with respect to hegemonic formations. I therefore assert that the hermeneutic paradigm and any formalism based upon it are fundamentally oppressive, and with specific pertinence to this discussion, masculinist. It follows, then, that any critical feminist musicology must attack the guarantee of the object by disembodying musical meaning from musical forms themselves in order to disable the fixing of meaning and enable a discourse in which the (musical) signifier is allowed to float, founded in a critical politics without guarantee (The vocabulary employed here is influenced by British sociologist Stuart Hall; the paradigmatic influence of Hall’s lecture entitled Race: The Floating Signifier ,1996, may also be keenly felt).
I propose that a ‘corrective lens’ which could bring McClary’s feminist project within reach of these objectives may be found in Lila Abu-Lughod’s article, "Writing Against Culture" (Lila Abu-Lughod, "Writing Against Culture," Recapturing Anthropology, ed. Richard G. Fox, 1991, pp. 137-162). In much the same way as I have argued that the fixing of meaning is masculinist, Abu-Lughod argues in her article that the generalizing practices of ethnography are masculinist. She posits that ‘culture,’ the object of anthropological study, is a mythic construct that is generated discursively with the express purpose of hiding the politics of enthographic interpretation, politics which serve to marginalize people and lifestyles along axes of power and specifically, to exclude or reduce the importance of certain people along the gender axis. Abu-Lughod militates against the guarantee of culture by arguing that "generalization … can no longer be regarded as neutral description" (149-150), and that the ‘truths’ of anthropological investigation must be recognized as not just partial but, most significantly, "positioned truths," as well (142). Abu-Lughod thereby moves to ‘disembody’ anthropological meaning from the anthropomorphized being, ‘culture,’ and instead reconfigure that meaning as fluid, dependent upon the discursive position from which an interpretation is deployed and not on the tangible presence of the observed object of study. She thus explodes the anthropological concept of culture and strives towards "ethnographies of the particular" (138). The end goal of her project is to achieve a paradigm of knowing "life as lived" the world over as consisting of the sloppy day-to-day political deliberations and struggles through which arguments and rhetorics slip in and out of usefulness and meanings are constantly shaped and mutilated, seized and discarded – all within shifting contexts across which positions and identities along innumerable axes and continuums are constantly being negotiated and re-negotiated, reified and disputed. This model through which all people are likened on the basis of the universally discursive significance of their identities and imaginations Abu-Lughod designates "tactical humanism" (157). It is just such a model for which I argued earlier – one which dispatches the guarantee of object or essence by effecting a shift from a paradigm based upon a principle of fixed meaning to one based instead on a principle of unfixed meaning.
If Lila Abu-Lughod’s ‘correctives’ are applied to Susan McClary’s outline for a feminist intervention in musicology, the result is a methodology capable of moving beyond formalism. While McClary’s work stands alone in making the case for the social significance of musical forms, her argument for a feminist musicology based on a semiology of musical signification re-inscribes a certain formalism which, as I have argued, fundamentally runs counter to her feminist agenda. The discursive fixing of meaning is a profoundly hegemonic project. Therefore, any effective critical campaign against hegemonic discourses must be waged against the apparatus through which their structures of meaning become fixed. The conclusion is that the only liberated discourse is one unbound from the oppressive guarantee of the object. The prospects of a world in which no argument is more than the contingent rhetoric of a changing politics seems chaotic indeed. But as Lila Abu-Lughod observes, in a certain sense, this is the way we already live, and we all manage to find some meaning on which to get by in this splendid carnival all the same.