Does the universal always lead to the resourceful?

I found this article while browsing around on an entirely different topic, but its very difference from the more mainstream socio-economic dealings with the particular vs the universal led me to want to quote it at length. It may not be immediately clear what an article on ethnomusicology might have to do with D/s, other than that ours is a particular lifestyle where often the only attempted understanding is an understanding of difference, primarily from a suppose universal, mainstream, "vanilla" lifestyle that we have apparently strayed from.

"In the course of my work as an ethnomusicologist specializing in music and copyright, however,
I have found, somewhat ironically, that perhaps the term ‘music’ may not be especially helpful as
a basic analytic category in my analyses. This is what I shall focus on briefly today, as a minor
point of discussion in the context of a much larger project.
The term ‘music’ is such a commonplace that it seems natural, and inevitable, that it be used as a
category for analysis in ethnomusicology. It seems to be understood that we know what it is that
we are referring to when we use the word. There are innumerable books, recordings, classes, and
conferences to support such a claim. Like those in the fields of musicology and ethnomusicology,
those who participate in the discourses of the law, economics, intellectual property, and copyright
also presume that there is such a thing as “music”. There is nothing in our experiences of the
music industry, technologies, music education, concert performance, and aesthetic appreciation
to suggest otherwise, it is assumed. Surely we can see ‘music’? Surely we can hear ‘music’?
I’m not so sure, and I’m not so sure we haven’t been flogging a dead horse for centuries. What if
there isn’t a ‘thing’ called music? What if our acceptance of the enclosed and enclosing
abstraction of a singular category of “music” is counterproductive to ethnomusicologists’
research concerns, at least those weighted towards the disciplines of anthropology and sociology?
What if we are able to analyze ‘music’ because we set out to analyze ‘music’, and classify,
separate, and differentiate in ways which justify our analysis and satisfy our curiosity - as
Foucault puts it, systematically forming the object of which we speak (1972:49). Many people
have a lot of power and status invested in and justified by the presumption of the existence of
‘music’ as a universal phenomenon. To paraphrase Foucault, however: “... it is precisely this idea
of [music] in itself that we cannot accept without examination” (1990:152).
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Scopic Enclosure
Of late, I have been perusing a range of literature in art history. I have been particularly interested
in the work of scholars such as William Ivins, Erwin Panofsky, Martin Jay, Norman Bryson,
Jonathan Crary, Rosalind Krauss, and David Levin. I find this area of work interesting for its
focus on the discursive production of the processes and practices of sight, vision, and visuality.
Working within overarching themes such as “the rationalization of sight” (Ivins) or “scopic
regimes” (Jay), these scholars have highlighted the privileging of sight or vision as a dominant
trope in the lives we lead. Some of them argue that this “ocularcentrism”, as it has been termed,
draws upon and in turn reinforces a variety of philosophical positions from Cartesian
methodologies through Baconian empiricism and Heideggerian ontology to theories of the
Sublime. Sight, again and again, is privileged as the prime sense, the superior sense, understood
no less than our primary way to access being itself. This privileging of sight regularly comes,
however, with a series of discursive companions. Those who critique ocularcentrism draw
attention to, for example,
• the presumed autonomy of vision,
• the constitution of a monocular Subject centred around the presumption of a singular eye,
• the dominance of stasis, fixity, and binary oppositions in associated analysis of experience,
• the attitude of domination, mastery, and control that often accompanies ocularcentrism, and,
importantly,
• the depeopled and disempowering ways in which people drawn to ocularcentric analysis make
sense of our experience
To reinterpret this literature within my own frameworks of analysis, I would suggest that an
underlying theme of ocularcentric discourses and practices is a pervasive expectation of the
elimination of uncertainty. In my own work, this expectation can be understood as a principle
from which arises the process and practices of enclosure. Indeed, I have come to understand
ocularcentrism in terms of scopic enclosure.
Sonic Enclosure
I am concerned that there is not a wealth of similar critique of sonic enclosure, as found in the
discourses and practices of ‘music’ and ‘the musical’. In comparison to art history, the issue has
received hardly any attention at all. Notable exceptions can be found in the work of Max Weber,
McCann AAA 2002
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John Zerzan, Michael Chanan, and Richard Leppert. In searching through the works of the most
influential philosophers in the development of discourses of ‘music’, readily available in Wayne
Bowman’s book Philosophical Perspectives on Music (1998), it seems to me that the elimination
of uncertainty is also a pervasive and highly-directive theme in the way in which these influential
philosophers make sense of their experience, and in the way they make sense of what they refer
to as ‘music’. The Pythagoreans, Augustine, and the majorly influential Boethius, for example,
wed conceptions of music to the harmonious immutability of number and mathematics. Plato’s
ambivalent conceptualizations of ‘music’ are intimately tied to his pursuit of perfection, utopia,
and ideal divine harmony. Kant’s aesthetic ideal is formalist in the extreme, where the intuition
of form and pattern is uncontaminated by the intrusions of sensation, purpose, or emotion.
Thinkers such as Hegel and Hanslick eliminate uncertainty in their conceptualization of music
through the opposition of ‘music’ to ‘language’ in the cause of essence and the certitude of
autonomy.
I could go on and on. My point is that the elimination of uncertainty is a pervasive theme in
dominant, orthodox discourses of ‘music’ and ‘the musical’, and in associated practices. The
discursive history of the concept of ‘music’, I would suggest, is a history of audio-centrism and
sonic enclosures. The consequences of audio-centrism are similar to those arising from the
disursive privileging of sight - ocularcentrism:
• the presumed autonomy of not just sound, but ‘music’ as a singularly abstracted quality of sound,
• the frequent understanding and conceptualization of ‘music’ as a reified entity or substance, often
anthropomorphized
• the constitution of a mono-audio Subject centered around the presumption of a singular ear,
• the dominance of stasis, fixity, and binary oppositions in associated analysis of experience and
meaning,
• the attitude of domination, mastery, and control that often accompanies audiocentrism, and,
importantly,
• the de-peopled and disempowering ways in which people drawn to audiocentric analysis make
sense of our experience
Audio-ocularcentrism
It is often forgotten, however, that dominant conceptions of ‘music’ privilege not only sound, but
also sight. Dominant discourses of ‘music’ and ‘the musical’, then, constitute and are constituted
by a powerful confluence of enclosures, being as they tend to be profoundly audio-ocularcentric.
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This combinatory privileging of sound and sight concedes further privilege to processes of
abstraction and reification in the cause of high levels of order, structure, pattern, in short, to the
aspiration or expectation of the elimination of uncertainty. To privilege sight and sound is a
primary methodological aspect of the dehumanized cleanliness of formalisms. Philosophers such
as Augustine and Gurney, for example, influentially conceive of vision and hearing as the
“higher senses”, differing from the lower senses of taste, smell, and touch in their capacity for the
perception of form:
“Not only do higher senses make fine, complex discriminations of which lower senses are
incapable, they further engage in a kind of formal, combinatory play that makes pure sensual
activity an exceedingly rare occurrence for eye and ear. Thus, the higher senses have the power to
group and combine sensa, an apparently inherent need to do so, and are distinctive for the
pleasure they take in perceiving form" (Bowman 1998:151).
In passing, it should follow, then, that a dominant characteristic of social interactions dominated
by the expansionary strategies and practices of enclosure, that is, social interactions dominated by
the expectation of the elimination of uncertainty, would likely be audio-ocularcentrism, the
privileging of sight, sound, abstraction, and reification. And indeed, this is what I have found in
other work.
There have of course been critiques leveled against the fundamental formalisms and abstractions
that suffuse discourses of ‘music’ and ‘the musical’, most notably from feminism and
postmodernism. Among the most salient critiques:
• that formalist approaches to ‘music’ are often in terms of contextual or negative definition, that
is, formalist approaches tend to articulate what ‘music’ is not rather than what it is
• that as a result of the reifying focus of dominant, orthodox discourses of ‘music’ and ‘the
musical’ there tends to be a systematic exclusion of people, relationships, power, meaning,
emotions, and the dynamics of social interaction from all relevant discussion. Instead, what tends
to draw attention, for example, are debates over replication and reproduction, difference and
distinction with regard to sonic minutiae. Such discourses, then, tend to be de-peopled and
disempowering.
• That, subsequently, discourses of ‘music’ and ‘the musical’ tend not to allow for adequate
consideration of power relations, and, in particular, adequate consideration of power relations of
domination and oppression. Analysis, then, tends to remain primarily descriptive rather than
explanatory.
• And lastly, that dominant, orthodox conceptions of ‘music’ and ‘the musical’ frequently rely on
an essentializing, abstracting, and abstracted universalism.
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Despite declaring open suspicion of the universalism implied by these discourses, scholars
drawing upon schools of thought within feminism and postmodernism still, however, adhere to
the central term “music”. Critical thinking in feminism, for example, tends to be profoundly
revisionist, advocating that we simply reinterpret the term, that we reinvest it with a wider range
of meanings than those which are normally present by association. It is declared that other
scholars drawn to formalism and idealist aesthetics have misconstrued ‘what music is’, normally
with blatant gender-bias, “drastically underestimating its significance and potency, and rendering
its sociopolitical and corporeal dimensions all but invisible” (Bowman 1998:387). The irony of
this, of course, is that feminist’s fundamental suspicion of universalist claims revolves around a
central universalist claim that remains untouched - that there is such a thing as ‘music’. Unified
or pluralist, objective or relativist, privileging sonic form or social experience, there is no
challenge taken to the basic assumptions of ‘music’ and ‘the musical’. Similarly in postmodern
critique, the underlying Grand Assumption remains untouched.
In some ways the discipline of ethnomusicology is also an attempt to back-pedal from the
privileging of sounds and sight that the concept of ‘music’ entails while still retaining ‘music’ at
the center of inquiry. Nevertheless, it seems to me that helpful theoretical engagements with
whatever people might mean by “music” may be those conducted in such a way as to leave
sound, vision, and reified material product as, at the very least, secondary concerns that can only
really be addressed successfully as part of comprehensive anthropological or sociological
analyses.
In many disciplines, ‘music’ is often analytically separated and abstracted from social context in
order to justify the validity of using the category as a universal label at all. This often leads us to
reduce our understanding of ‘music’ to those aspects which, as we participate in their reification
and autonomy, guide us to blind ourselves to the specificity of locally-negotiated meanings and
power relations. Seeking to understand ‘music’ as a universal or total phenomenon often draws
us to the safest common denominators of similarity in comparative analysis, which are music-assound,
music-as-vision (e.g., notation), or music-as-thing (e.g., recorded product), or music as an
entity. In my own work I have found that to embrace this safety is to replicate biases towards
visualization, auralization, segmentation, and fixation that are to be found within the discursive
assemblies of copyright. I would suggest, then, that a healthy skepticism in the face of the term
‘music’ is especially crucial in my own work on account of the perils of discursive complicity.
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When used as a foundational category in the field of ‘music and copyright’, ‘music’ tends to
guide my analyses towards the consideration of reified sonic or visual entities, compounding the
implicit reification of orthodox legal, economic, and literary discourses, further leading me to
privilege considerations of access, control, and ownership, further guiding me to think in terms of
resource management, precisely the approaches I am trying to avoid."

-Beyond the Term 'Music'
American Anthropological Association 23rd November, 2002
Anthony McCann mccannat@si.edu
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Trying to avoid being resource-managed ...

Mitdasein