Showing papers in "new formations in 2009"

Software Sequencers and Cyborg Singers: Popular Music in the Digital Hypermodern

Abstract: It has been almost twenty years since Andrew Goodwin's classic essay, 'Sample and Hold', claimed that pop music had entered a new phase of digital reproduction. (1) If the digital sampler was postmodernism's musical engine, then hip hop was its recombinant form, and the erosion of divisions between original and copy the celebrated consequence. Popular music had become an engorged repository of itself, its history ransacked as source material for a kind of stitched-together melange of past fragments. For Goodwin, sampling had undermined received ideas of human creativity and craft, deconstructing notions of the romantic author and pouring into pop a distinctly post-human sensibility. In fact, as divisions between human creativity and machinic automation blurred, it became impossible to tell whether a sound had been produced manually, synthesized or reproduced digitally. The 'strange case' of the handclap was a particularly postmodern parable. Techno musicians had favoured the sound of a first-generation synthetic clap produced by the Roland TR-808 drum machine over a more natural-sounding successor provided by Roland's TR-707 because the former, while sonically non-mimetic, had become the 'real' signature of electronic music. In other words, the synthetic sign had replaced the organic referent to become the 'real'. In which case, digitalisation accompanied a wholesale transformation towards postmodern culture as a regime of surface over depth and play over seriousness. (2) But an air of ambiguity pervades Goodwin's essay, and rightly so. As he puts it, 'pop might be eating itself, but the old ideologies and aesthetics are still on the menu' (p272). Indeed, to this day, discourses of authorship and authenticity continue to lubricate pop's sense of itself as trading in talent and originality, while 'aura', far from disappearing, is alive and well in attitudes to the immediacy and presence of the live performer. Meanwhile, the co-mingling of analogue and digital technologies in the studios and bedrooms of musicians is testament to the complex interweavings of socio-technical forms and their convergence in practice, while a distinctly 'modern' medium, vinyl, continues to be valorised by DJs as containing 'warm' qualities flattened by digital reproduction. Hardly postmodern then, if the prefix is taken seriously as a wholesale departure from the conventions, practices and forms of the modern era. Indeed, we might speculate, twenty years after the orgy, that the term postmodern was always a lazy, totalising and fashionable shorthand that could never have captured the full complexity and range of phenomena it was supposed to cover. In this essay I want to examine music's technological mediations, linking this to more recent attempts to theorise the shifting nature of contemporary popular music. The basic argument is that we can learn a lot about where we are in the history of popular music by looking at conditions of cultural production, not merely at single styles, techniques or devices such as the sampler. I want to suggest that an examination of recent production techniques and technologies labelled 'digital' can tell us significant things about contemporary musical cultures, including how they are meeting broader tendencies towards flexibility and de-materialisation in social practices at large, but that this meeting takes place in an extended moment of cultural acceleration and intensity--a hypermodern moment. This moves music onto terrains that threaten, stretch and play with boundaries between human and machine, as well as real and simulated, although not always in expected ways. The focus of attention will be on digital recording practices and changing forms of musical creativity, not merely because so much attention has been heaped upon the digital--in music, in characterisations of so-called 'network economies', in the business of globalisation and the rise of new media--but also because it is an apposite time to grasp Walter Benjamin's 'now of recognisability' and assess how these technologies align with new and old habits of thought and practice, before they slip unnoticed into convention. …

Music and Postmodernity

Abstract: Translated by David Bennett I When there are no more rules at all, the time of atonalism has come. Of what precedes it, absolutely nothing remains. Yet, the sound remains ... And the sound leaves immense remains. I would like to start with this simultaneously melancholy and joyful observation of Pierre Schaeffer's, written ten years ago, to identify, once again, the nature of the postmodern question. In The Postmodern Condition, which is a Report written some twelve years ago for a Canadian institution, I tried to understand, and to make understood, an event. (2) To lend an ear to an event is the most difficult thing in the world. An event is not what occupies the front page of newspapers. It is something that supervenes, that comes out of nowhere. As such, this thing is still nothing: we don't know how to explain it or even to name it. We are not ready for it, we don't have what is needed to welcome or to account for it in a system of signification, what is needed to identify it. And yet, if it occurs, it must touch some 'surface' where it leaves its trace: a consciousness, an unconsciousness, individual or collective. Perhaps it even had to invent this surface in order to leave such a trace. This trace is not comprehensible immediately. It is a strange trace, a trace of strangeness, awaiting its identification, although the event has already occurred. This is why it is difficult to 'lend an ear' to the event: it has already passed even before it is clear what it is. The Report thus attempted to articulate what event touched developed societies (for this was the object of the study, as specified by the commission) at the end of the 1970s. I thought of this event as western. The West is the part of the human world that 'invents' the Idea of emancipation, of the self-constitution of communities by themselves, and that tries to realise this Idea. The realisation of this idea rests on the principle that history is the record of the progress of freedom in human space and time. The first expression of this principle is Christian, the latest Marxist. The Postmodern Condition referred to the discourse of these philosophies of history by the shorthand name of 'grand narrative'. There are several grand narratives co-existing in western thought. The postmodern condition is the result of these grand narratives ceasing to be credible. They are no longer able to legitimate, in the name of progress, the benefits and detriments that the West has bestowed upon itself and the world throughout the centuries. I will not explain here the grounds that may be found to justify this diagnosis. They are obviously open to debate, and the diagnosis is itself too vast not to be questioned. Nevertheless, the recent implosion of the states founded on the Marxist grand narrative brings a sort of plausibility to the hypothesis formulated ten years earlier. It will be objected that the fall of the Soviet Union proves, rather, the vitality of the capitalist grand narrative. I shall respond that there is no capitalist grand narrative. Capitalism develops everything, but this development is not necessarily the progress of freedom. This development complicates the relations between the elements of a system in such a way that that system finds itself performing better. Most often, this occurs at the expense of another system, which will be condemned to disappear if it does not improve its performance. This is a process objectively governed by a law of increasing differentiation (negative entropy). It operates without finality. It is indifferent to good and bad, right and wrong, or, if we prefer, the only good that it recognises is the improvement of performances. We can only influence it, give it directions, or moderate it by working in its way, or within its terms. This is obvious in matters concerning economics or in techno-scientific research. The postmodern condition is that of human beings when they are caught in this process, which simultaneously develops their powers and demands their enslavement. …

Postnationalism, Postmodernism and the German Discourse(s) of Weltmusik

Abstract: Since the mid-1960s, just after the time at which Jameson posits the emergence of postmodernist aesthetics, (1) German musicians and producers, operating in a range of fields of musical production from highbrow Ernste-Musik ('serious music') to jazz and rock, have experimented with notions of Weltmusik (a term I will not translate since, in German discourses, Weltmusik has tended to signify western music in which various musical components are thought to synthesise into a whole, whereas the English term 'world music' has often been used by the music industry as a marketing label to represent 'authentic' musics from the margins). (2) These musicians include the high modernist Karlheinz Stockhausen, the various modern jazz musicians who participated in the producer Joachim-Ernst Berendt's Jazz Meets the World Series (1965-71) and Weltmusik summits (1983-85), the 'Krautrock' group CAN (with its so-called Ethnographic Forgery Series, 1968-78), and others. Weltmusik activities have not been 'merely' musical; they have frequently been subjected to considerable ideological interpretation. Readers familiar with English-language debates about 'world music' and 'world beat'--debates conducted with a vehemence that escalated markedly in the 1990s--will not be surprised to learn this. As David Bennett has shown in a recent article, following Steven Feld's useful typology, the positions taken in these Anglophone debates generally adhere to either 'anxious' or 'celebratory' narratives of world music. Anxious narratives, taking a neo-Marxist tack, tend to focus on the ways in which western musicians and the large recording companies, protected by their position of relative economic power and by copyright law, are able to appropriate (or expropriate) musical material from the margins and turn a profit from it, a profit in which the musical creators from the margins do not equally share. By contrast, the celebratory narratives stress ideas of 'fluidity, hybridity and collaborative exchange ... underpinned by postmodern anti-essentialist theories of the performative, dialogical and porous nature of all cultural identities'. (3) While the German discourses of Weltmusik reflect many similar concerns, this article will show how and why they diverge from their Anglophone counterparts. Significantly, the German debates were initiated well before the rise of 'world music' and 'world beat' as marketing terms in the English-speaking world in the mid-1980s, and they were strongly influenced by the comparatively recent memory of National Socialism. For this reason, they were also highly polemical. My analysis will focus, in particular, on the notions advanced by J-E. Berendt, as one of the foremost and longest-running champions of Weltmusik, as well as on the critiques that he attracted from German critics, musicologists, sociologists and philosophers, including Peter Sloterdijk and others. I shall examine how a peculiarly German antinationalist Weltmusik discourse has been informed by the trauma of National Socialism, just as it has contended with postmodernity and broader anxieties (also reflected in the wider English-language discourses on world music) about the breakdown of grand narratives and with utopian hopes arising from the processes of globalisation. My aim is thus to unpack the paradoxical meanings of Weltmusik as a music that acknowledges the fragmentation of (post)modernity and yet yearns for a new wholeness--and as a music that deliberately questions earlier notions of cultural essentialism and is capable of celebrating cultural inauthenticity, but which still retains concepts of 'otherness'. Finally, the essay performs what the musicologist Veit Erlmann calls an ethnography of Weltmusik, by analysing some of the ways in which the experience of 'authentic' alterity and global communication have been constructed within extra-musical discourses (such as in articles, cover notes, concert and record reviews). (4) It also examines the processes in which--to use an expression of Timothy Taylor's--'different sounds' have been mobilised in Germany 'as a way of constructing and/or solidifying new identities'. …

Hannah Arendt's Testimony: Judging in a Lawless World

Abstract: I was really of the opinion that Eichmann was a buffoon. I'll tell you this: I read the transcript of his police investigation, thirty-six hundred pages, read it, and read it very carefully, and I do not know how many times I laughed--laughed out loud! People took this reaction in a bad way. I cannot do anything about that. But I know one thing. Three minutes before certain death, I probably still would laugh. And that, they say, is the tone of voice. That the tone of voice is predominantly ironic is completely true. The tone of voice in this case is really the person. Hannah Arendt (1) Hannah Arendt's laughter has long rung hollow in the ears of many commentators on the Eichmann trial. The ironic tone of Arendt's controversial reports on the trial, Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), her critics claim, is a mode of defence; a cold-hearted carapace of bitter reason thrown up against the atrocious history of unbearable suffering dramatised in the 62 days of harrowing witness testimony that made the 1961 Jerusalem trial unique in the history of war crime trials. As Idith Zertal has argued recently, however, it was not--or at least not only--the suffering of Holocaust survivors per se that Arendt was distancing herself from in pre-1967 Jerusalem, but the sanctification of that suffering within an emerging politics of Israeli nationhood. In Zertal's unsettling history of the vexed relation between trauma, grief, collective memory and national politics in Israel, Arendt's deliberate irreverence deconstructs a national mythology that did not so much deliver justice to Holocaust victims--'as if justice could be rendered', writes Zertal of Prime Minister, David Ben Gurion's presentation of the Eichmann trial as an uniquely expiatory event in the history of Israel--as set extraordinarily difficult cultural and political terms on the representation of that justice itself. (2) In this essay, I want to suggest that Arendt's refusal to inhabit a rhetoric of traumatic testimony--a refusal that differs so strikingly from the tone of much contemporary memoir writing--connects Eichmann in Jerusalem with her larger project to think about judgement in the 1960s and 1970s. For Arendt, the Prosecution's emphasis on 'what the Jews had suffered, not on what Eichmann had done', in her words, was questionable politically, but could not be further from what she thought should have been the trial's main business: the risky, necessary and exhilarating legal, moral and philosophical task of defining new terms for judgement after the Shoah. (3) For Arendt, Eichmann the buffoon was the disturbingly vacuous correlative for the moral void left by Nazi history. Finding him funny was part of what it meant to judge him. If one can somehow be one's own irony, as Arendt later suggested in the interview with Gunter Gaus cited above, if irony turns out to be a kind of kernel of the historical and remembering self and not merely a protective shell, it is perhaps because the ironic voice positions the subject in a distinctive relation to historical injury--not only as a suffering, but as a political, moral and, crucially in Arendt's later writing on judgement, thinking witness. I GREY CATS One of the paradoxes of the Eichmann trial was that while nobody really doubted that the defendant was guilty, the guilt of others not in the glass box dominated discussion of it. From Eichmann's ludicrous self-aggrandising claims that his death would serve as an example to all future anti-semites and at the same time relieve Germany's youth of its guilt complex, to Ben Gurion's, 'We want the nations of the world to know [...] and they should be ashamed'(EinJ, p10), the trial took place in a highly-charged culture of grief and expiation in which Eichmann's guilt was not only a given, but even on occasion an irrelevance. (Ben Gurion again: 'the fate of Eichmann, the person, has no interest for me whatsoever. What is important is the spectacle' (IH, p107). …

John McGahern: memory, autobiography, fiction, history

Abstract: This article, a contribution to a special issue on the modes and meanings of life writing, discusses John McGahern's rural autobiographical novels. It focuses on their genre, their reception, and their critical import in relation to Irish twentieth-century history and its revisioning. It is first of all noted that the novels' evident basis in the writer's life, and their location in specific places (precisely identifiable by a knowledgeable reader), accounts for their reception by many reviewers and critics as a quasi-documentary record, able to supplement or displace ideas about rural Ireland associated with de Valeran nationalism. Particular attention is paid to the representation in The Dark and Amongst Women of childhood trauma: namely, abuse at the hands of patriarchal authority. Such abuse was prevalent in the Ireland about which McGahern wrote, but impossible to acknowledge publicly (though it has recently been intensively discussed): the banning by the Irish censor of The Dark, at the time of its original London publication in 1965, is an emblematic instance of that repression. The narrative strategies by which McGahern registers and makes manageable the reality of trauma are considered in the context of this collective repression and recovered memory. The article concludes by taking up some points made by Joe Cleary in a recent critique of naturalism in late twentieth-century Irish writing, including McGahern's. A comparison is drawn with Raymond Williams' Border Country, which deploys the socialist perspective Cleary evidently desiderates. It is argued that the terms of such a perspective are already present in the life-world of the young Williams, as they were not in that of McGahern. Moreover, if there is a degree of authorial self-limitation in McGahern, this may be a condition of the particularly intimate response his work elicits from readers; and hence of what Irish President Mary McAleese referred to at the time of McGahern's death as its 'immense contribution to our self-understanding as a nation'.

The Sonorous, the Haptic and the Intensive

Abstract: In a recent discussion of his work, the Australian composer David Chesworth described his Melbourne-based sound installation 'Proximities' as an example of 'disturbed space'. (1) Conceived by Chesworth and his collaborator Sonia Leber as 'a sonic corridor of human voices', 'Proximities' is a soundscape built up from the artists' recordings of the singing voices of people from fifty-three Commonwealth nations now living in Australia. The work is situated on the William Barak Bridge (a broad pedestrian bridge near the centre of Melbourne, named after a leading nineteenth-century Aboriginal painter and activist) and allows its visitors to hear the sounds of the city alongside those of the installation. The sounds of the installation, moreover, are evenly distributed throughout space, via computer-fed speakers along both sides of the bridge, in a manner directly opposed to that of the concert tradition, where the listener is seated before a performing group. Does this 'disturbed space' constitute the disruption of a natural condition--the postmodern composer's typically transgressive attempt to work against the natural orientations of the human body? This would certainly seem to be the case according to one particularly dominant strain of postmodern theory, which insists that we perceive the world through always already ordered systems and that there can be no experience or event outside these systems. (2) This particular strain of postmodern theory, which we may broadly characterise as the deconstructive approach, would present a distanced, critical and oppositional perspective with respect to its object of study (in this case, music). Theory, in this acceptation, would thus constitute a continuation of the transcendentally ideal turn of Kantianism: (3) we cannot know things as they are in themselves, it would argue, for we always experience the given world as other than, or in relation to, ourselves. There is no unmediated reality or event; the world is always lived and experienced as this or that determination of being, in relation to our own point of view. The 'sense' of Chesworth and Leber's soundscape would thus appear to lie in a reaction against the history of art itself: in its refusal, for example, both of the staging of the musical work of art and of the recorded piece that may be repeated through time. (4) This position may be productively contrasted, however, with another, equally postmodern sense of theory: that to be found in the vitalist, expressivist and intuition-oriented philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. Resolutely refusing a pre-established world of relations, systems and points of view, this theoretical enterprise aims instead to experience the differential power of life in its very potential to constitute relations. According to this perspective, music would not constitute a referential system: we would read or hear music not as it relates to a system of signs always already given in advance but, rather, according to its capacity to transform bodies, organs and territories. This 'sense' (5) of Chesworth and Leber's soundscape would thus enable a distinctly positive understanding of the postmodern, in which the transformation of the system (the preestablished organisation of sound) would disturb the form of content, enabling bodies to be affected in ever new ways. (6) There would be not so much 'a' musical work, which may be heard from various distances or points of view, as a distribution of sound that is each time different depending on the situation of the visitor, with every position generating its own discrete network of sound relations. (7) This essay aims to explore and defend the sense of this second postmodern theoretical approach to music. Only if we think beyond the first sense of theory as a critical relation to life and experience, we argue, will we able to encounter the force of music. Music is not one system among others (akin to the formal systems of language in the narrow sense); rather, it is only because there is musicality--which Deleuze and Guattari variously refer to as the 'refrain' or as 'rhythm' (8)--that more narrowly formal linguistic systems are themselves possible. …

Who do you think you are? Feminist memoir writing

Abstract: 'This is not a memoir' is the opening sentence of my book, Making Trouble! Oh yes it is, my publishers said, fully aware that in recent years it is books packaged as memoir, which, as they like to say, 'shift units'. 'This Is Not About me', the Scottish novelist, Janice Galloway calls the childhood memoir she has just published, knowing that childhood is, precisely, all about those people and things around you, implanting themselves, being implanted, upon you. Galloway evokes the narratives engulfing her on reaching puberty: 'I was turning into a moody cow like Aunt Kitty. If I didn't get a grip, I'd be a cheeky bitch, like [older sister] Cora before I knew what had happened. I wouldn't trust me to behave at all'. (We know that story.) However, I had many other reasons, besides childhood's porousness, to be wary of the 'memoir' label tagged to Making Trouble, in which I wanted, primarily, to think about recent feminist history from the joyful rebirth of 'women's liberation', now some four decades ago, right up to the present moment. I wanted, for instance, to suggest how strange is so much seen as feminism's contentious afterlife: for instance, think of those three women in the FTSE 100 index of top executives earning over three million each last year. Has feminism failed because there are still only three women up there? Or has feminism, once so preoccupied with issues of equality, failed because some women aspire to earn such obscene salaries, several million times more than the majority of women globally took home last year. (And I am not going to dwell upon any animals 'with lipstick', aquatic or agrarian, although the contradictions of Sarah Palin, when she stood for the vice presidency of the USA in 2008, with her explicitly antifeminist stances, are also part of feminism's ambiguous afterlife). What makes feminist legacies so contentious? As different 'generations', those waves, as many like to depict them, kept on rolling in, rolling over, what went before, one so fast upon another. Making Trouble was hardly 'my' story, as one expendable cog on a journey, or at least moving along some crevice of the journeys, I was exploring. Of course, I was once again probing issues I've addressed often enough before, though this time in a less theoretical, more personal voice, mapping out my own engagement in, distance from, the particular patterns, conflicts, alliances and misalliances, of that movement quickly labelled '2nd-wave feminism'. It was, as most of you'll know, a movement that later veered off into a jumble of popular and academic feminisms, multiplying and dividing, as movements do (its offshoots battling with each other, soon seemingly far distant from their original roots). One branch contained the vast diversity of grass-roots campaigning, whether workplace or community based, alongside policy reform initiatives, and much more. Another branch, first moulding while sharing common experiences as women; later, if entering scholarly domains, often embracing Derridean or Foucauldian deconstructions of 'experience', while soon questioning the meaning of 'gender', 'sexuality', indeed, any notion of 'identity' at all, as always--to borrow Judith Butler's influential framings--contingent, provisional, illusory, 'performative', at the very least, permanently problematic. Putting myself in the frame, then, I was exploring how ideas, especially those political ideas that influence our lives, arise, mutate, then often fade away before our very eyes, though we may struggle, as best we can, to keep a hold on them. Even our own memories are not safe from the re-writings of history, as Walter Benjamin once said, though in somewhat different words and a very different context. (1) This thought is expressed in the old Soviet joke I kept hearing till recently: 'The future is certain, it is only the past that is unpredictable'. (2) (The joke's disappeared suddenly, however, since right now , following the financial crisis begun in 2008, even the future is looking just a little less certain, though sadly not through any actions we've chosen. …

On burning, saving and stealing letters

Abstract: Most people do not keep the letters or emails they receive, let alone copies of their own; the very idea can strike one as hubristic. But these exchanges can have dangerous afterlives. Some letters are sombrely preserved, even sent to archives and editors, while others are disposed of equally seriously. Burning a letter describes many literary denouements for that reason. Destroying a personal letter is especially associated with love or family gone wrong, just as the preservation of personal letters is typically a woman's task. Archiving, publishing or even simply analysing letters is therefore a delicate business, traversing the correspondent's relationship with other relationships between editor, publisher, archivist and public reader. Those new layers of negotiation, as I discovered when researching my book on the role of letters in contemporary feminism, ironically requires writing more letters and emails. How do we balance individual need for privacy, or conversely, for public attention against collective interest for education, for political change, for amusement? Rather than rehearse now long-standing battles about the aesthetic potential of communicative forms, I wish here to reflect on what the publication of letters may tell us about their peculiarity as life writing how the ethical dilemmas raised by the acts of preserving and collecting letters are bound up with the wider conflict in life writing between the obligation to truth and the obligations of trust. The burned letter highlights the significance of the letter as a material object, and why it may feel dangerous to let it survive its original function and context. Feminist critics have wished nevertheless to save and make public personal letters, and editors wrestle with ethical questions as well as with letter writers, owners and their inheritors in compiling letter collections. Epistolary publication, like letter writing itself, is ethically hazardous because it involves relationships of difference, power, and desire.

Naming: music and the postmodern

Abstract: Things postmodern have not been missing from music, but use of the term 'postmodern,' as either a descriptive or conceptual tool, has been sparse in professional and even journalistic writing about music. While Stephen Connor's observation, in his introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism, that there has been a tendency toward 'conservatism' and 'autonomy' in the academic study of music is certainly apt, it cannot fully explain the 'absence of a mature discourse' on 'postmodernist formulations and arguments.' Connor recommends that music studies address the 'explosion of collaborations and fusions' and the narrowing of the 'gap between classical and popular music;' but music scholars are frequently distrustful of a simple valorisation of fusions and bridges because the bridges often entail movement in one direction and the fusions are only partial. (1) I do not offer here an imperative for future directions in music scholarship, but rather take a historical view, addressing the issue of why music scholars and other music writers did not engage in substantial numbers in the postmodern debate, especially in the 1980s when the topic was burning. My argument is that while an explicit and focused debate was not present, musical practices and thought about those practices did manifest the issues that would come to define postmodernism from the mid-1960s through the early 1990s. A more explicit engagement with the conceptual dimensions of postmodern thought emerged significantly in the 1990s, but even then (and now) there remains a lingering distrust of the term and its implications. (2) If the discourse of music and the discourse about music in the thirty-year span between the 1960s and 1990s did manifest some of the characteristics of postmodern thought and the postmodern world, then why did writers avoid the term as a descriptive tool? In his 1987 book The Postmodern Turn, Ihab Hassan notes that 'there is a will to power in nomenclature, as well as in people or texts'. (3) About a decade later, the music scholar Leo Treitler would turn the formulation around, observing that 'labelling' has been a sign of the postmodern. (4) For both Hassan and Treitler, naming serves to make something appear, to give it shape - for Hassan it manifests a will to power and for Treitler it manifests a will to shape identities for marketing purposes. (5) The concern of each author for such naming draws attention to the resistance in discourse about music to employ the label 'postmodern'. (6) Music scholars and music critics are not averse to labelling generally, but in the instance of the postmodern, they avoided the term. The sources of this refusal of naming were varied. In a 1969 essay 'Music Discomposed,' the American philosopher Stanley Cavell notes that there is little 'critical' writing about music and that technical analyses of individual pieces have become necessary aesthetic accompaniments to those works. (7) About a decade later, Jacques Attali makes a similar observation when quoting Michel Serres: 'This remarkable absence of texts on music' is tied to the impossibility of a general definition, to a fundamental ambiguity. 'The science of the rational use of sounds, that is, those sounds organized as a scale.' That is how the Littre at the end of the 19th century defined music, in order to reduce it to its harmonic dimension, to confuse it with a pure syntax.' Michel Serres [reminds] us that beyond syntax there is meaning. (8) Writing at a time when the first instances of a postmodern music were emerging, Cavell and Attali wanted a critical address of musical meaning but found instead a technical address of musical syntax. In order to sort through both the historical implications of their comments and the divergence of disciplinary concerns, it will be helpful to consider who in professional music scholarship writes about music and why. For present purposes, I consider three categories of scholarship: musicology and ethnomusicology; music theory and analysis; and journalistic writing. …

Biography and theory reconsidered: second Wittgensteinian thoughts

Abstract: In an article published last year, (1) I argued that biography offered, or should offer if done properly, a paradigm example of Wittgenstein's notion of 'the understanding that consists in seeing connections' (Philosophical Investigations, Part I, paragraph 122), a type of understanding that Wittgenstein identified as his goal in philosophy and which , crucially, is non-theoretical. Biography, I maintained, is a perfect exemplar of this kind of understanding and, as such, it is fundamentally mistaken, either to search for a theory of biography or to read or write biography as if it were in any way a theoretical enterprise. I developed this view through a four-pronged assault: 1. a survey of the scholarly, but non-academic literature on biography from Dr Johnson to the early twentieth century, seeking to identify the forces that pulled it in the direction of theory; (2) 2. an examination of the work of those biographers who have approached their task in a consciously theoretical manner; 3. a critical engagement with the recent theoretical literature about biography; and 4. an application to biography of Wittgenstein's non-theoretical notion of philosophical understanding. I want in this present essay to respond to a difficulty in my argument that centres on the notion of 'theory' as that notion is variously understood by (a) Wittgenstein, (b) some theorists and (c) the general public. At the heart of the difficulty is the thought that Wittgenstein and I may be using the word 'theory' in an artificially and illegitimately narrow way that is not in conformity with its normal usage. This thought, as it applies to Wittgenstein (but not in connection with either my work or biography), has been explored in some depth and with no little subtlety by the late Oswald Hanfling in his article 'The Use of "Theory" in Philosophy'. (3) Hanfling begins by noting a strong connection in Wittgenstein's work between his insistence that philosophy is non-theoretical and his equally fervent insistence that philosophy is not a science. Philosophical Investigations Part I, paragraph 109, which contains his famous and oft-quoted remarks about theory ('And we may not advance any kind of theory. There must not be anything hypothetical in our considerations. We must do away with all explanation and description alone must take its place') begins: 'It was true to say that our considerations could not be scientific one', an allusion, Hanfling persuasively suggests, to Tractatus 4.111: 'Philosophy is not one of the natural sciences'. Does Wittgenstein think that saying that philosophy is not a theoretical discipline is the same thing as saying that it is not a science? Does he think, in other words, that scientific theories are the only kind? Well, it certainly seems to be true that the words he uses to characterise theories are those most commonly associated with science. As Hanfling puts it: A theory, as indicated in those passages [Philosophical Investigations [section]109, 126] is put forward with the purpose of explaining as opposed to describing, and the explaining is done by reference to something that is hidden, as opposed to lying open to view. Such theories may be hypothetical, and the problems with which they deal are empirical ones. (4) What is being described here, surely, is, first and foremost a scientific theory. When characterising Wittgenstein's use of the word 'theory' in Philosophical Investigations, however, it is worth bearing in mind that the available sample is very small. In fact, paragraph 109 is the only place in the entire book in which the word occurs. It is nonetheless a crucial word. Elsewhere in Wittgenstein's work, it is possible to find several instances of the word being used to describe what Wittgenstein is not doing. For instance: 'What we do is the opposite of theorizing. Theory blinds' (MS 133, 1946-47), 'What we are not looking for is a 'philosophical theory" (MS130, 1946), and, when his discussions with the Vienna Circle touched on the subject of ethics and the attempt to understand the notion of moral value, he remarked: If I were told anything that was a theory, I would say, No, no! …

Strings in the Earth and Air

Abstract: Strings in the earth and air Make music sweet; Strings by the river where The willows meet. James Joyce, Chamber Music The opening poem in Joyce's Chamber Music evokes an ideal of ubiquitous, sourceless, air-born music that reaches back, via the Aeolian harp, to Pythagoras and the doctrine of the music of the spheres. Joyce himself would give Leopold Bloom the opportunity for a parody of his rather perfumed little volume of poems in the 'Sirens' episode of Ulysses, in which he hear-thinks about another kind of chamber music: 'Chamber music. Could make a kind of pun on that. It is a kind of music I often thought when she. Acoustics that is. Tinkling. Empty vessels make most noise ... Diddle iddle addle addle oodle oodle. Hissss'. Rather than thinking directly about what, at this time of day, postmodernism might mean in or for music, I want to think about ubiquity, amplitude, spread, diffusion, reach. More specifically, I'd like to think about an antinomy between two principles, both of which have respectable claims to be thought of as characteristically postmodern. The first is the ideal of what might be called a general or unrestricted economy of music--the principle that, having no essence to restrict it, music can and should be anything. The second is the ideal, or at least the prospect, of an auditory ecology, which would insist on an acknowledgement of limit or finitude. I will be using the work of R. Murray Schafer, the great inaugurator of the idea of acoustic ecology in the 1970s, to focus this argument. In 1992, Schafer proposed that 'it would be possible to write the entire history of European music in terms of walls, showing not only how the varying resonances of its performance spaces have affected its harmonies, tempi and timbres, but also to show how its social character evolved once it was set apart from everyday life'. (1) For Schafer, music, like theatre, has become an intramural occupation, pursued behind closed doors. In a sense, all music has become a kind of chamber music, requiring closed spaces for its performance and the closure of space itself. Music has become more and more architectural, a matter of infinite riches in a little room. It has required and enacted envelopment, condensation, convergence, intensity, synchronicity. The orchestra has become the staging of the occupation of space by music and the preoccupation with space in music. The point of music has precisely been that it comes to a point, whether that be the tip of the conductor's baton, the stylus, or the play button. The development of recording technology, which might have been expected to have mobilised and deterritorialised music, in fact made it for a time even more sedentary and sequestered, merely diversifying the occasions of its pocketed apartness. If radio broadcasting allowed music to escape the confines of the concert hall, for example, the music funnelled into and clung around the form of the radio apparatus itself, which, by the 1920s, had achieved its characteristic massiness and monumentality, enjoining a kind of deferentially frontal listening. This frontality is retained in the epic era of stadium rock and outdoor concerts, in which, however huge and diffused the audience may be, the music nevertheless is made to erupt from a kind of vanishing point constituted by the stage. But the expansion in what Schafer called 'schizophonic' apparatuses--for separating sounds from their origins in space and in time--along with the increasing miniaturisation and impalpability of musical devices, has now brought about a vast propagation of the idea and experience of music, which increasingly can arise anywhere and on any occasion. Just as architecture has itself become more and more suffused with air, so the architecture of music has more and more taken to the air. Schafer wrote in his Tuning of the World that 'the blurring of the edges between music and environmental sounds may eventually prove to be the most striking feature of all twentieth-century music'. …

On not writing biography

Abstract: The archives of Frances Hamilton (1742-1802) of Bishops Lydeard near Taunton, Somerset, were a gift to a historian wanting to remake the English working class by entering domestic servants--as workers--into historical accounts of England's transition to capitalist modernity. (1) She was born Frances Coles, the daughter of a local attorney. After a brief marriage to Thomas Hamilton, a Bath medical man ('My dear Mr Hamilton [died] 7th June 1779 ... Married 5 Years & five Weeks ...' she brooded in her diary) she returned to the small family estate at Bishops Lydeard, which she farmed up until her death. She kept painstaking household and farm accounts and records of her reading, over twenty volumes and twenty-two years. She employed a labour force in her house and on her farm; she thought about labour, in the abstract, and practically, in order to manage and pay it. And every farthing that left her purse had its passage recorded. Once, in 1796, she could not recall exactly how much she had paid her washerwoman at 6d a day ('Catherine paid her abt 2s'), but that was one tiny faltering in twenty years of reckoning up her profits and losses. (2) Anyway, she often lent Catherine money, and their meetings to settle accounts always involved complicated calculations on both sides. On this occasion Hamilton remembered that she had lent her 2s after a previous wash, as well as paying her. These were highly useful accounts, and they have been called meticulous. (3) She moved with evident ease between old prescription books of her husband containing builders' bills and indoor servants' wages, and an old volume of inventories where she recorded payment to her casual workers. Borrowings from the local Book Society were listed next to her washerwomen's accounts. When she kept a diary--what she called a 'Day Book'--it was in an old ledger of lawyer's bills, probably her father's. (4) She used all these volumes regularly, to transfer records from her daybook to her housekeeping or farm accounts, and quarterly, to compile a statement of farm outgoings and income. She owned less than a hundred acres and was perhaps unusual in keeping such detailed records; it is said that the practice was more likely among men and women with larger holdings than hers. (5) The model of writing and recording at work in Hamilton's volumes was modern and secular. She did not use her notebooks and ledgers as an aid to worship in the way that Michael Mascuch has described for other eighteenth-century diary-writers. (6) Hamilton sat through many a sermon at Bishops Lydeard, but made notes on not one of them. Each birthday she inscribed a prayer asking that she might be granted an increase in goodness over the coming year, but she did not write in daily conversation with God, as did some of her contemporaries. (7) She only rarely copied out aphorisms or extended passages from her reading; rather, when she made a comment it was brief and succinct--an expression of her opinion on the matter. Compared with some of her contemporaries, her relationship with the texts that furnished her religious and political imagination was one of some independence. She was a woman--and a reader--who not only knew her own mind but also how it had been cultivated. Her brief assessment of Dugald Stewart's Philosophy ('a Book I have a high opinion of ') was initialled. (8) This indicates a sense of an audience for her writing, even if the audience was just herself. But writing '1 pound Mackaroons', '1 pound of Sausages', 'Oisters 1/2 C', 'Worsted for my Apprentices', 'Straw', '[paid] Spiller Haberdasher in full', '[paid] Dinham shoemaker in full', was not done for an imagined audience in the same way. It was done so that she knew how much money she had spent, and though she might read these entries again (and again) she had not the intention of communicating something by them. By way of contrast with the journal-keeping of another gentleman's daughter of the same period, the Lancastrian Elizabeth Shackleton, Hamilton's focus was on production rather than consumption, on the men and women, their labour and their wages for labour, that allowed her to wrest a living from her own acres. …

Reflections on Joan Didion's the Year of Magical Thinking

Abstract: In 1993, Anne Hunsaker Hawkins published Reconstructing Illness, a study of memoirs about the experience of disease, dysfunction or death for which she coined a new term: pathography. In a move familiar from the brief flowering of the 'personal criticism' movement in the late 1980s, Hawkins confessed that her academic interest had been motivated by her own father's death: the critical work thus shared the very impulse it sought to analyse. In Reconstructing Illness, Hawkins noted a striking fact: before 1950, she had discovered only a handful of published pathographies. After 1950, the genre had haltingly emerged but then accelerated, particularly in the 1980s, with hundreds of texts published. But even more strikingly, the number of pathographies doubled again in just the six years between 1993 and 1999, when the second edition of Hawkins' book appeared. (1) This spike in production placed pathography at the heart of the contemporary boom in the trauma memoir. In the 1990s, life writing was partially re-oriented to pivot around the intrusive traumatic event that, at a stroke, shattered narrative coherence. The sociologist Arthur Frank saw illness as 'narrative wreckage' and pathography as a literal narrative salve: 'Stories have to repair the damage that illness has done'. (2) This formulation owed much to the philosopher Paul Ricoeur, who regarded narrative as an act of con-figuration which '"grasps together" and integrates into one whole and complete story multiple and scattered events'. (3) Trauma is a dis-figuration of that narrative possibility, but what the narrative memoir promises is a redemptive account of how the post-traumatic self might be re-configured around its woundedness. The trauma memoir is one of the cultural symptoms that follows from the securing of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder as a recognised psychiatric illness in official diagnostics in 1980, after a long campaign of psychiatric advocacy in the 1970s by a coalition of activists. It has been my contention that many forms of culture have played a significant role in articulating how PTSD seems to affect the narrative possibilities of selfhood after 1980. (4) The memoir boom is now a vast and complicated delta region with major channels but also curious back-waters, and is treacherous to map. However, it is important to distinguish the tributaries rather than subsume everything into an undifferentiated trauma discourse. For the record, we might distinguish five elements that converge to produce the memoir boom since the 1990s: 1) the feminist revaluation of the autobiographical utterance, at the level of therapeutic practice, life writing, and in critical theory; 2) a politicisation of the illness memoir by people with AIDS, producing a large body of testimony designed both to commemorate the dead and to denounce medical or governmental ignorance; 3) an expanding terrain of pathographies that began with cancer memoirs but soon moved into subsets including depression, exotic or bizarre disorders and parental illness or death; 4) the related rise of thanatography, or death writing, which might include memoirs by carers for the terminally ill, suicide in the family, or accounts of the mourning process; and 5) the re-programming of the celebrity expose to be organised around the revelation of the traumatic secret (a boom begun in England with the phenomenal success of the autobiography of the glamour model, Katie Price, Being Jordan). These elements run the gamut from honourable and political interventions to the plain tiresome and narcissistic. But they are also only the most immediate determinants of the boom. Many of the questions of the ethics and aesthetics of narrating extreme and deathly experience have been determined by Holocaust testimony. This has held centre place in many cultural theories of the representation of trauma that emerged in the early 1990s. In sum, we might regard the trauma memoir as the exemplary form of what Ross Chambers has termed 'aftermath cultures,' defined by a testimonial impulse that is nevertheless marked by 'a strange nexus of denial and acknowledgement'. …

More Pomo than Thou: The Status of Cultural Meanings in Music

Abstract: It happens. Overnight, you change from Young Turk to Old Fogy; the former avant-garde becomes rear-guard action. In the mythologised Sixties, we used to view the 1930s Marxists, with their class-based obsessions, as quaint; another thirty years pass, and members of the Youth Generation who first lived and later theorised the Postmodern Condition get to see their own ideals grow obsolete. In one's bleaker moments, one recalls how Boulez crowed in 1952 that 'SCHOENBERG IS DEAD', that he had not pushed his own insights far enough, that he had unwittingly perpetuated elements held over from Romanticism. (1) For, the so-called New Musicologists now face charges that our work bears the traces of (horror!) Modernism; that, even if we first introduced concepts such as poststructuralism, deconstruction and Deleuzian rhizomes into the discipline, we ourselves no longer qualify as postmodern. Move over: the genuine standard-bearers have arrived! Well, maybe we had it coming. Milton Babbitt must have felt this way, too, when he got pushed aside. (2) As anyone who has studied history knows, such waves occur on a regular basis: like clockwork, today's cutting edge becomes tomorrow's ancien regime. To be sure, the Sixties generation has always believed it had some kind of trademark lock on the 'new', making it necessary for those coming afterwards to set off bombs under us to clear space for themselves. Since I don't want to be part of the revolution that eats its young, I suppose I should just graciously step aside--and, believe me, I'm very much looking forward to my retirement! In the meantime, I have mostly retreated into writing about early music, albeit inflected to some extent with my own antiquated version of postmodernism, leaving the battle over the present moment to others. And yet, I would like to leave something of a PoMo valediction behind. In Ecclesiastes we read that there is nothing new under the sun, that all pretences to the contrary amount to nothing more than vanity. OK, but things do change, even if only on the meagre basis of two steps forward and one back. Women's movements may not have brought about all the permanent transformations they have sought, but the very fact that I am presenting this paper testifies to some modicum of progress along those fronts, even if my make-up argues that some of our more radical causes have bitten the dust. (3) Similarly, I'd like to think that my generation's contributions to composition and music studies--call them what you like--will have left some lasting traces. In The Wild One, someone asks the Marlon Brando character: 'What are you rebelling against?' To which he replies: 'Waddya got?' Given that each generation feels compelled to rebel against whatever the previous one upheld, the 'post' of 'postmodern' always hauls along with it the particular vision of its predecessor--which actually makes this but one more version of the modernist paradigm, whereby one gets a thrill by identifying with the Moderns against the Ancients. Only, now, it is the Postmoderns against the Moderns. Or, more precisely, the Neo-Postmoderns against Those-Formerly-Known-as-the-Postmoderns, in a pattern of infinite regress. So, against what was my generation of postmodernists rebelling? Forgive me if I begin to sound like the stereotypical curmudgeon railing on about what it was like to walk to school in the snow before the advent of automobiles. But back in the days, composers who wanted to gain any foothold in North American and European circles had to--I repeat: HAD to--submit to serialism. To paraphrase Allen Ginsberg, I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by pitch-class sets. The same cultural imperative had put the kibosh on discussing meanings within musicology: one could perform archival work, make editions or analyse formal properties, but one could not suggest that a piece made any particular cultural difference. In both arenas, music mattered precisely because it had managed to transcend 'mere' meaning. …

James Brown - the 'illogic' of innovation

Abstract: Although James Brown's seminal musical pioneering was popular during the mid-1960s, his educated band members were of view that his Funk prototype was simplistic and unsophisticated and thus not really to be taken seriously. With the curiosity to establish how the 'Godfather of Souls' managed to maintain the required level of agency to direct the trained talent and synthesize such differences of musical opinion into the cohesive and enduring influence on popular music, an illustration of how a certain type of naivety was necessary to realize one of music's most creative forces, one that exemplifies the necessity of the illogical in the age of informational regime is presented.

'Chair Creaks, Though No One Sits There': Decomposition and Liquidity

Abstract: How to describe and analyse a process from within, without self-aggrandisement, without exaggeration, yet engage a dispassionate listener? How to remember each small incident that influenced the outcome, and how to recall significant moments of revelation or realisation from the past, recent and distant, the pressure they may have exerted on the making of a single work? These are discursive notes, perhaps addressing the subject. The work may have begun in a room, though this seems unlikely. If it did begin in a room, then the room may have been quiet; if that were the case (which I'm inclined to accept for the sake of argument) then that quiet room was not just one room, because quiet rooms build up in your life: rooms within rooms within rooms, rooms in dreams, and now virtual myspace rooms and chat rooms. All these rooms were themselves enfolded within unfamiliar rooms that age barely remembers (or chooses to forget): those rooms of dread and pleasure, action and boredom, safety and danger. Their atmosphere accumulates, standing in relation to the feeling of being in rooms when something big was at stake: classroom, exam room, bedroom. 'Clocks spring to mind', I began to write (until realising that springing insinuates itself into the text as a pun, and puns are not my style, but clocks once defined the feeling of rooms): clocks ticking, measuring time, slowly, quietly, a presence, an interior atmosphere, dividing time with their chimes, then resuming their steady plod through ... what exactly? Each tick and tock seemed to freeze time, and if the clock stopped then the feeling of a room would change, dramatically. 'The worn voices of clocks repeated the fact of the hour all night long,' wrote Virginia Woolf in Jacob's Room. Indoor silence once was occupied, regulated and even articulated by a clock; it was not silence at all, of course, but the tick and the tock were paroxysms around which silence seemed to gather, like vultures round a corpse, waiting for the ungiven signal for decomposition. Now we have digital clocks, small battery operated clocks with a tick so fugitive that only paranoid listening in the middle of the night can search it out, and the visual noise but apparent audio silence of numerical displays on TVs, ovens, microwaves, computers and phones--so quiet rooms and the people within them now float within a more continuous and subliminal form of air. All of these devices radiate electromagnetic emissions, so their silence is illusory. With the right equipment, they materialise, just like the things of the air thronging H.P. Lovecraft's fiction. There are other small sounds; maybe they form wisps into solids, glue pieces into forms, keep people sane, or shield them from loneliness and the void. Georges Perec wrote about the man who stared at nothing, his radio playing at such low volume that no one really knew if he could hear it, yet when Madame Nochere went to switch it off, he stopped her. He listened to the hit parade every night: that was his claim. When I was a teenager, I listened to the hit parade at low volume, night, bedclothes, sleeping parents ... also indulging in melancholy, as is standard, and it being the 1960s, there was plenty of material to feed both needs. Poignant in its description of fragility, vulnerability, isolation bordering on chronic withdrawal, one of Brian Wilson's most revealing ballads, 'In My Room', described the bedroom as a world, a friend, a confidant, a refuge, an ear, a place of listening in which other people were absent. The lyrics, written by Gary Usher, were prophetic, since they anticipated Brian's notorious withdrawal into pyjamas--a bed-bound descent into the maelstrom of high calorie food, TV and cocaine that began in summer 1973 and ended in late 1975. Mark Rothko, also famously troubled, wrote interesting things about air. 'Tactile space, or for the sake of simplicity, let us call it air, which exists between objects or shapes in the picture, is painted so that it gives the impression of a solid,' he wrote. …

Lyotard, Post-Politics and Riotous Music

Abstract: When the finger points at the moon, the IDIOT looks at the finger. Chinese Proverb--graffito on the wall of the Paris Conservatoire de Musique, May, 1968 (1) In the wake of the 'evenements' of May 1968, Jean-Francois Lyotard promised to write a history, or rather an 'antihistory', of the irreducibly singular energy-events he took them to be. His statement of intent survives with the subtitle: 'Unpublished introduction to an unfinished book on the movement of March 22' (the latter being the Nanterre University student movement that, so to speak, got the May ball rolling). (2) Lyotard never did write up his account of those events--unsurprisingly, given his construction of 'event' and 'history' as virtual antonyms. Perhaps he should have composed a piece of music instead, for the terms in which he approached the proper-named event of 'May '68' are much the same as those in which he approached music, but not just any music: not, for example, what he scorned as the market-driven eclecticism of much 'postmodernist' music, with its anything-goes-if-it-sells pseudo-aesthetic, nor even modernist music as he sometimes defined the term 'modernist', but what he more often preferred to call 'avant-garde' music. The irreducibly singular political event that forces a rethinking of politics tout court is Lyotard's model for the irreducibly singular musical event that forces a rethinking of music and sound itself. But perhaps we should invert that relation, acknowledging the primacy of the aesthetic instance in Lyotard's thought, since he accords avant-garde artists a kind of epistemological privilege over philosophers and political radicals as witnesses of 'events'. Lyotard had an investment in not understanding the phenomena of May '68. Disenchanted with organised Left politics and its 'representative' institutions, he thanked the student radicals (the enrages or 'young rowdies', as he called them) who caught Leninist doctrine unawares by showing that there can be a revolutionary movement without a revolutionary theory--thanked them for staging the explosive energy-event which, he said, 'got him out of the impasse between "militant" delirium and scepticism', (3) changing his mood, which had been swinging between party-line dogmatism and impotent doubt, by showing him that newness could enter the world. Lyotard thus had a libidinal investment in not 'dissolv[ing] the delirium, the unjustifiability, and the passion of May '68 into a simple phenomenon to be understood'. (4) His aborted introduction to his unwritten account of the failed revolution of May '68 criticises History for forecasting the past: 'a history book always aims to produce a historian's knowledge ... a discourse ... in which the nonsense of the event will be rendered intelligible, fully signified, and thus in principle predictable', whereas the movement of March 22 had 'performed a work of unbinding, an antipolitical work, that brings about the collapse rather than the reinforcement of the system'. (5) Thus, for a Lyotard disillusioned with the bureaucratic politics of workers' representative organisations and with the Hegelian ends and Rousseauistic origins of grand narratives of emancipation and self-realisation, the key feature of the May '68 movement was the fact that it did not fulfil anyone's master-plan: 'No one', he writes, 'had thought about what the movement did. The movement turned out this way, caught everything established and all thought (including revolutionary thought) off guard, offering a figure of what this society represses or denies, a figure of its unconscious desire'. To try to make the movement 'take its place within a system of knowledge' would thus be to betray it; 'rather, one must try to show how it defeated the distribution of places imposed by the capitalist-bureaucratic system'--the system that assigns every event a place in its 'accounts'. (6) More particularly, Lyotard has a problem with representing May '68 because he wants to interpret it as a critique of representation itself, both as institutionalised in the political party or the labour union and in its broadest sense as 'the exteriorisation of activity', or 'the mise en spectacle' that turns actors into mere role-players and 'public opinion' into a mere spectator of events. …

The Archive and the Detail

Abstract: A discussion of historical methodology and historical consciousness, cultural change, social relations, human singularity and imaginative life, cultural difference, social feeling and cultural attachment.

The Missing Photograph: Charlotte Salomon Life? or Theatre? as the Encounter with Maternal Loss

Abstract: [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] I One hundred and twenty images into the cycle of 769 paintings that form an image-music-text, presented as a 'three-coloured operetta' and, titled, teasingly, Leben? Oder Theater?/Life? or Theatre? created in 1941-1942 by a twenty-five year old painter, Charlotte Salomon (1917-1943), we find the first full-face image of one of its key characters, Franziska (fig.1). A long oval face is surmounted by two mounds of brown hair that frame her forehead. Large, almond-shaped brown eyes gaze out from beneath strong brows. A long straight but full nose leads down towards half-opened red lips. The figure is dressed in a dark jumper that fits closely with a frill round her neck. The face is painted against a deep blue, otherwise plain, background. In the empty hollows on the page on each side of her face two, mirroring, death masks enter into the picture from each side of the frame. White, with closed eyes but red lips, their ghostly presences might explain the distress on the face of the 'character' who stares out of the image. On tracing paper laid over the image, and written in large red capitals in gouache in a pattern that descends across the face and upper body of the central female figure is written: '"Am I to blame for her death?" my Franzchen asked herself '. The 'her' whose death seems to haunt the central figure may be the intruding, repeated face with the closed eyes and deadly pallor. From their place in the sequence of paintings/texts of Life? or Theatre? we know that the death masks represent the recently deceased younger sister, Charlotte, who committed suicide in 1913 of the pictured 'Franzchen.' The enunciator of the overlaying statement, however, is not in the image. Nor is she the author of the painting. 'She' is the mother of both the women in the picture, the living and the dead sisters. The image represents her memories of her daughters. A painting, 23 paintings earlier in the sequence, introduces the dive into memory as Scene 5 of the Prologue to Life? or Theatre? theatrically declaring that 'Mrs. Knarre has withdrawn entirely into herself and lets her tragic, troubled life pass before her eyes in her own poetic form.' (JHM 4254). (1) As if in hypertext, Life? or Theatre? has opened a wormhole into what the artwork invents as the memories of an old woman who has suffered terrible bereavements largely through suicides of many members of her family, including both her two daughters. (2) In this device of imagining her reflecting back upon her memories of her tragically burdened life, the viewer is made to see her daughters through the eyes of a mother who traumatically, unnaturally, outlived both her children. Scene 5 works like a cinematic flashback to create a subjectivity for a woman who, at the time the paintings were being made, was herself also dead, overwhelmed by grief and terror at the fascist conquest of France, through suicide. It is in this 'telling' of events leading to the death of 'Franzchen' that have already been narrated in the opening section of the work ((JHM 4179-4181) by means of a completely different visual mode and in a 'historical' rather than discursive manner that the viewer is brought 'face to face' with an image of Franziska. In painting 131 (fig. 2) another 'portrait' of Franziska occurs. Frontally and centrally positioned, this time the face appears in a reverse rhyme flanked by two other faces that seem to emanate from her head. Both face outwards and away from her. Far from pressing in to haunt her, they represent familial others who look away. These represent the woman's husband and daughter. Over this image lies a transparency on which we find reference to a melody: and the words: 'And my husband loves me not/ And my child, she needs me not/ Why, oh why am I alive ... So her thoughts ran in her mind'. The final phrase inscribes again the narrating mother's/ the outsider's point of view, or, for the work, the invisible (grand) maternal narrator telling us how Franziska feels; the verses are provided as her own song, reminding us of the operatic motif of the aria as interior monologue. …