Music After All

Abstract

For musicologists in the postmodern academy, the notion of context wields great force, both as a hermeneutic tool and as a meeting ground for a set of political beliefs that enable scholars to justify the meaning and relevance of their work. Primarily, this ideology is constituted by identity politics, the politics of difference and alterity, and the politics of locality and particularity. While acknowledging that musicological acts of cultural and historical contextualization per se are powerful means of illuminating cultural products, this essay nevertheless seeks, in its first half, to raise a set of questions regarding the efficacy of the accompanying political ideology within the pervasively unstable and dialectically totalized world of the early twenty-first century. Drawing extensively on the writings of the Slovenian cultural critic and theorist Slavoj Žižek and the French philosopher Alain Badiou, I argue that increasingly any localized context must be understood to be cut across by a kind of traumatic universalism that is, predominantly, economic in orientation. The second part of the essay, however, turns in a different direction and argues that the route out of musicology's present political contradictions may lie not so much in the project of attempting once more to synthesize musicological and political practices into one, but rather through affirming the import of two (both musicology and politics, and music and politics). Through recourse to three theoretical discourses (into Heidegger, Hegel, and aspects of the Marxist tradition), the essay revisits the notion of musical autonomy, rescripting it—through an extensive analogy with dance—into a site where something unknown might manifest itself. Although it is acknowledged that this kind of site, strategically placed, might function effectively politically, it is nevertheless asserted that it is of sufficient import, in and of itself, to be preserved and nurtured, and that musicology in the academy is one of the privileged locations for where that might happen.