Prelude to a Theory of Gestural Time, Proto-Geometry, and Music

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter draws on prompts from Rolf Inge Godøy, Edmund Husserl, and a range of Indigenous, queer, and decolonial phenomenological thinkers to frame a theory of gestural time for music that rethinks the relationship between experience and perception. It plays with the distinction between Husserl’s “exact” and “descriptive” sciences, putting the latter to work as a productive foil to the drive for empirical exactitude that animates much perception and cognition theory. It does so not to replace exactitude, but to enrich the experiential nexus. Gesture emerges as an at least equally (and perhaps more) plausible first principle for reunderstanding the mechanisms by which perception functions. Focusing on a debate on categorical identity between Rainer Polak and Justin London, it considers the possibility that a turn to affect—understood in Baruch Spinoza’s sense of a pre-personal flow of force relations that condition the very possibility of experience and perception in the first place—can work to elide certain kinds of experimental cleavings to a priori category distinctions and to at least provisionally displace perceptual exactitude as the primary location for understanding musical experience.