Pierre Macherey and Music, Social Construction, More

Pierre Macherey should be better known here in the US. Please get yourself a copy of Macherey’s Pour une théory de la production littérair, or *A Theory of Literary Production* (translated by Geoffrey Wall).

I outline here some ways Pierre Macherey’s approach might hep us understand our musical situation. These are based on my present (mis)understanding of Macherey’s work.

Macherey and Social Constructionism

–The US is pathologically extroverted.

–There is absolutely nothing wrong with social construction, except that its exegetes only look at the extroverted, People Magazine products, the tip of the iceberg.

–Macherey’s approach to a text is complicated. In short, *what’s said* is a production within a whole, of a whole. What is said is not at all severed from what is not said. What is not said is the *unconscious* of the text.

–Everything is socially constructed. That’s a tautology, but the paradigm in our depraved, dysfunctional arts establishment is to declare that *only what the masses are consuming* is worthy of critical attention.

– Perhaps Macherey’s work can help us defeat toxic social constructionism. What survives the bloody chaos of the moment will include much that comes from shy *introverts*, whose music says, **yes, that, and more**, like Bach’s brilliant commentaries on Telemann.

An attempt to frame some questions about compositional ideologies

It’s problematic. Schopenhauer takes music as a purely innocent practice, and as the model of transparency.

“…all art constantly aspires to the condition of music.” – Walter Pater

And yet approaches to musical composition become ideological. Music is a practice. Music has uses. Musical experiences are primary experiences. As such, perhaps music is outside of Macherey’s purview.

Processing music through music industries, or through academic situations (still some kind of marketplace?) brings ideologies into music.

Macherey’s “front & back” or object/shadow might apply to discussions before and after music, as it applies to words after experience? I don’t know how to frame the discussion. I am a fan, not an expert on Macherey.

I can attempt an example — Spectral music is now very important in France. Spectralists wipe the slate clean of confusing, contentious ideologies and practices that became bad habits; they responded to modernist mission creep, but also, perhaps to creative exhaustion. For respite they focused on a timeless fact — the overtone series. The spectralists and microtonalists summon what was not there in the 12EDO; there is an ardent yearning for new spaces.

From a pre-spectral modernist perspective (admittedly, my perspective) the spectral composers are deliberately depriving themselves of expressive and propulsive devices that worked very well in pre-spectral modernists (at their best). Proponents of the spectral orientaton aver spectral music has a static quality. Nevertheless, the spectral shake up will lead to unexpected new expressive and propulsive devices.

Other losses were felt after 1918 and the high modernists attempted valiantly many syncretisms and salvage operations. Scott Johnson is a hero in this area, showing how modernist techniques are not incompatible with vernacular music. Scott can be compared to what Gunther Schuller and Meyer Kupferman were trying to do with Third Stream. At this point, I’m hoping for salvage operations *within* the spectral scene.

This translates well, as I see it: *Music is a product*. I translated & adapted a statement of Macherey —

“Composers are not a subject centered in their creation, they are an element in a situation or a system.”

Doesn’t that seem to work?

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A note on *the identity of man*.

From Macherey’s *A Theory of Literary Construction, chapter 11 – “Creation and Production” –

To become other (alienation), to become oneself (creation): the two ideas are equivalent in so far as they belong to the same problematic. Alienated man is man without man: man without God, without that God who is, for man, man himself. Formulated thus, the question of ‘man’ involves unresolvable contradictions: how can man change without becoming other? So he must be protected, allowed to remain as he is: forbidden to transform his condition. The ideology of humanism is spontaneously and profoundly ractionary both in theory and in practice. The only activity allowed to the man-god is the preservation of his identity. The only possible legitimate changes are those which give man what already belongs to hin: his property, even if he has never actually owned it.

This reminds me of TE Hulme’s “A Tory Philosophy”. There Hulme declares his disdain for what he describes as a pathological Romanticism that tries to pull man (up) into something else. (I think of Ernst Bloch’s book on Hope, and with ideologically dishonesty, let’s agree not to give up on *the perfectibility of us.)

I also think of Jacob Burckhardt’s “rejection of chronological evolution”, and moreover: “Burckhardt is deeply struck by these first strides toward a comparative sociological method and by the insistence of the Greek author (Thucidydes) *on the identity of human nature* in the changing kaleidoscope of the historical world. (This all from Albert Salomon’s essay on Burckhardt.)

Can music be useful as a way to reflect and elucidate shifting conjunctures? —

This quote of Macherey is credited to Koettlitz, Olivier (2011-12-01). “Entretien avec Pierre Macherey”. Le Philosophoire (in French) (20): 7–20. ISSN 1283-7091.

Macherey has described philosophy in the ‘grand sense’ as “a conjunctural practice, which has no other means of surpassing the limits imposed by the conjunctures with which it is confronted other than to reflect on them and to elucidate their conditions in such a way as to eventually be able to intervene with regard to them and, therefore, to contribute to the transformation or evolution of these conjunctures.”

Perhaps Macherey’s shifting conjunctures are middle grounds, where the backgrounds are more fixed?

Is the transition from high modernist values to the spectral values such a conjuncture? Is music a way of feeling those conjunctures?

Note: I’m sincere about modernist mission creep. It happened from generations of teachers who failed in various mysterious ways, among those, I argue, – how to guard against what I call symmetry death. My modernist heroes mostly did a great job of avoiding symmetry death. The spectral orientation, emphasizing the overtone series, whose every pitch is an entirely unique phenomenon, leads to other serious problems.

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Expanding on this list of references to *the identity of man*, all from essays by an imporant figure from the University in Exile, Albert Salomon.

–Saint-Simon
“Saint-Simon’s style was based on a conception of man as a stream of consciousness that moves and is moved in the context of his life, acting, and being acted upon–a strange and wondreful phenomenon in which everything could coexisty, the sublime and the vulgar, the heroic and the vile, the ridiculous and the tragid, the proud and the despicable.”

–Fontenelle
“According to Fontenelle, the mind alone has history. What people usually call hisotry–the changes and transformations in political institutions and in the alignments of social roles–should be called perennial sameness. There is no becoming and advancing in the current of historical time; there is nothing but the unceasing identity of human greed, resentments, lusts, and hatreds. Fontenelle called this sameness the Heart.”

–Thucydides via Burckhardt
“Burckhardt is deeply struck by these first strides toward a comparative sociological method and by the insistence of the Greek author (Thucydides) on the identity of human nature in the changing kaleidoscope of the historical world. This is the reason that Burckhardt insists on proclaiming Thucydides as the ancestor of his method in spite of his being a political historian.”

Is “the identity of man” idealist?