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Growing donkey ears: the animal politics of music education
Abstract
This article problematizes the view that music education is primarily justified on account of its uniquely humanizing influence. Not only does this general humanist argument clearly fail to convince policy-makers to actually revalidate public music education, but moreover it often seems to rest on highly questionable premises. Without contesting the idea itself that music education can be a humanizing agency, we will try to show that such humanization cannot be achieved without acknowledging music’s inhuman, animal forces. While first this paradox is elaborated through a philosophical reading of the Ancient myth of Midas’s donkey ears, a second part will expand on its implications for the political bearing of music’s contemporary public-educational (ir)relevance. Ultimately, we claim that by paying closer attention to the ways in which music allows animal ‘nonsense’ to disrupt processes of collective human sense-making, we can start thinking of practices of music education that might truly engender a renewed sense of humanity.
... There is an emerging interest in posthuman ideas in relation to music education, which highlights embodied, affective and relational understandings of music-making and learning within musical ecologies (Cooke & Colucci-Gray, 2019;Woods, 2020;Crickmay & Ruck Keene 2022;de Bruin & Southcott, 2023). An engagement with the materiality of sound (Wilson, 2021;Powell & Somerville, 2020) also contributes to revealing hierarchies in knowledge and ways of knowing and being in music (Woods, 2020(Woods, , 2019Koopal et al., 2022). The understanding of posthumanism that we adopt in this chapter builds on a number of these themes. ...
This open access book aims to show how creative ruptions – disturbances or commotions - can lead to the emergence of ethical, care-ful educational futures. Grounded in empirical and theoretical research undertaken from posthuman, decolonial, new materialist and feminist perspectives, this edited volume questions historical and current assumptions as to how education is structured and enacted, and provides examples and tools illustrating how to create and work with creative ruptions. Under the guidance of an experienced editorial team, the authors demonstrate how creative ruptions can respond to various wicked problems through the design and enactment of transformative pedagogies and accompanying research. Including consideration of how we can grow our emotional repertoires from anxiety to include hope and courage, the book explores how creativity might expand the horizons of personal, social and political possibility that take shape within – and ultimately determine – education and its futures. Offering theoretically driven and practically grounded transdisciplinary examples of alternative educational futures, this volume is an ideal reading for those interested in the intersecting fields of Possibilities Studies in Education, Creativity in Education, Educational Futures, Pedagogy, and related disciplines.
... There is an emerging interest in posthuman ideas in relation to music education, which highlights embodied, affective and relational understandings of music-making and learning within musical ecologies (Cooke & Colucci-Gray, 2019;Woods, 2020;Crickmay & Ruck Keene 2022;de Bruin & Southcott, 2023). An engagement with the materiality of sound (Wilson, 2021;Powell & Somerville, 2020) also contributes to revealing hierarchies in knowledge and ways of knowing and being in music (Woods, 2020(Woods, , 2019Koopal et al., 2022). The understanding of posthumanism that we adopt in this chapter builds on a number of these themes. ...
This chapter seeks to explore decolonisation as a creative orientation to problematise the politics of knowledge hierarchies of university curriculum (research methods in the case of this chapter) in order to respond to issues of epistemic violence and exclusion, and create transformative and radical ideas about the future of education. The critical discussions are the result of my interactions with different educators and students within the UK and beyond, my lived experience as an Algerian Kabyle who immigrated to the UK, and my doctoral research. The latter sought to explore the lived experiences of EFL (English as a foreign language) master’s (MA) students in studying research methodology and writing their dissertations in education fields at an Algerian university. I begin to discuss my own education journey in both Algeria and the UK which was grounded in Eurocentrism. The chapter then defines the concept of decolonisation in the context of educational research, and what this proposed orientation may mean for the future of education. I further explain the significance of using decolonisation as a creative approach to address exclusion and inequality, and invite readers to think of what it may mean in terms of their practices, pedagogies and creating new possible realities of educational futures. I also conclude with offering some practical ideas for change to decolonise educational research methods curriculum in a higher education (HE) context.
... There is an emerging interest in posthuman ideas in relation to music education, which highlights embodied, affective and relational understandings of music-making and learning within musical ecologies (Cooke & Colucci-Gray, 2019;Woods, 2020;Crickmay & Ruck Keene 2022;de Bruin & Southcott, 2023). An engagement with the materiality of sound (Wilson, 2021;Powell & Somerville, 2020) also contributes to revealing hierarchies in knowledge and ways of knowing and being in music (Woods, 2020(Woods, , 2019Koopal et al., 2022). The understanding of posthumanism that we adopt in this chapter builds on a number of these themes. ...
This chapter offers insight into a project which provokes alternative educational futures and imaginative ways of facing current challenging issues, in this case dementia, through adopting an approach which values emergence, creativity and care-ful responses. In our co-writing and making, we reflect on an improvisatory musical practice involving people with dementia, their family, carers and a team of professional musicians and facilitators, working together with voices, instruments, words and images. We consider this practice, melding the human, the sonic and the material, in dialogue with posthuman theory which we weave together with music, words and images creatively generated by the group and the authors in recent workshops both in person and online. Through a series of ‘diffractions’ of our data, we consider how those living with dementia may help us to focus on learning as a response-able encounter, a co-creative emergence in a liminal space that opens towards the unforeseeable future. There are a series of field recordings that accompany this text: you will find links to them next to headings and subheadings; we invite you to listen to them as you read.
1. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (New York: MacMillan Publishing, 1976), §255.
2. In an essay forthcoming in David Elliott's Critical Matters (Oxford University Press) I use a quote by Wendell Berry to make this point about global thinking: "Properly speaking global thinking is not possible. Those who have thought globally have done so by means of simplification too extreme and oppressive to merit the name of thought." "Out of Your Car, Off Your Horse," The Atlantic Monthly (February 1991) 61.
3. I have explored this aspect of intentionality in my "Sound, Sociality, and Music," Parts I & II. The Quarterly Journal of Music Teaching and Learning, Vol.3 (Fall 1994): 50-67.
4. See Francis Sparshott "Aesthetics of Music—Limits and Grounds" in Phillip Alperson's What is Music? (New York: Haven Press, 1986) for elaboration of this important point.
5. This is so not only because of music's profound cultural and stylistic plurality and diversity, but also because of the contingency of any and all value claims we might wish to make, even for particular practices.
6. Note that one of the things this reformulation attempts to do is to dissolve the implication that there exists a dichotomous relationship between music and people, a gap supposedly in need of bridging by value.
7. This is among the points advanced and elaborated by Sparshott in the seminal essay referred to in note 4, above. I take Sparshott's point about the elaboration of basic tendencies here but seek to expand it somewhat from the view he advanced, since his interest in "listenable sound" (see note 8, below) seems subtly to favor listening above other important uses to which people put musical engagements.
8. According to Sparshott, interest in knowing manifests itself in exploration of the limits of listenable sound. The gaming tendency transforms humanly emitted sound from symptoms of some condition into expressive representations and eventually into sounds whose production has no apparent point beyond the interest they present in themselves. And patterning, of course, transforms mere sounds into artifacts with recurrent similarities recognizable as styles.
9. Or "belonging," as Terry Gates calls it in his response to question number two of MENC's Vision 2020 project.
10. Actually, the last of these probably maps itself onto both the structural and the social dimensions of music: that is, it is important to knowing and patterning in both the cognitive and the social worlds (not that the two can be disentangled).
11. Charles Keil and Steven Feld, Music Grooves (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
12. Christopher Small makes a similar point in his book Musicking (1998), where he discusses (after Bateson) the importance of first-, second-, and third-order relationships to musical experience. The emphasis on cross-modality that I attempt to introduce here is nicely elaborated in George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's important book, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999).
13. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952). I explore Kant in my Philosophical Perspectives on Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998) 74-91.
14. I have explored these in my book Philosophical Perspectives on Music through the writings of David Burrows, 283-93.
15. I venture to say that such fundamental musical qualities as movement, gesture, timbre, rhythm, and tension/release are each profoundly and inextricably bodily achievements.
16. "A Somatic, 'Here-And-Now' Semantic: Music, Body, and Self." Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education, no. 144 (Spring 2000): 45-60.
17. John Shepherd and Peter Wicke, Music and Cultural Theory (Polity Press, 1997). My review of the book appears in the Council for Research in Music Education Bulletin 140 (Spring, 1999): 77-81. Although this is not the place to pursue the matter in detail, this claim to uniqueness clearly requires an exploration of the ways sound intended and perceived as musical differs from sound that supports things like linguistic utterance and noise. I have attempted to explore these in my "Sound, Society, and Music 'Proper'," Philosophy of Music Education Review 2, No. 1 (Spring...
This article is interdisciplinary in its claims. Evolving around the ecological concept of affordance, it brings together pragmatics and ecological psychology. Starting from the theoretical writings of Peirce, Dewey and James, the biosemiotic claims of von Uexküll, Gibson’s ecological approach to perception and some empirical evidence from recent neurobiological research, it elaborates on the concepts of experiential and enactive cognition as applied to music. In order to provide an operational description of this approach, it introduces some conceptual tools from the domain of cybernetics with a major focus on the concept of circularity, which links perception to action in a continuous process of sense-making and interaction with the environment. As such, it is closely related to some pragmatic, biosemiotic and ecosemiotic claims which can be subsumed under the general notion of functional significance. An attempt is made to apply this conceptual framework to the process of musical sense-making which involves the realisation of systemic cognition in the context of epistemic interactions that are grounded in our biology and possibilities for adaptive control. Central in this approach is the concept of coping with the environment, or, in musical terms, to perceive the sounding music in terms of what it affords for the consummation of musical behaviour.
In this volume, the Department of Philosophy of the University of Amsterdam presents the two Spinoza Lectures delivered by Bruno Latour, Professor and Vice-President for Research at Sciences-Po, Paris, in April and May 2005.
Comparaison des conceptions esthetique et pratique de la philosophie de l'enseignement de la musique, l'une developpee par B. Reimer, et l'autre par D. J. Elliott. Examinant la critique de l'education musicale comme education esthetique chez Elliott, fondee sur les notions d'objet et de perception musicale, l'A. montre que les deux approches impliquent des positions differentes sur la nature esthetique et cognitive de la musique, ainsi que sur l'experience de la musique comme performance et interpretation. En conclusion, l'A. defend une position intermediaire entre l'esthetique et la pratique qui consiste en une polarisation du concept et de l'activite musicaux
In this article I try to conceive a new approach towards laughter in the context of formal schooling. I focus on laughter in so far as it is a bodily response during which we are entirely delivered to uncontrollable, spasmodic reactions. To see the educational relevance of this particular kind of laughter, as well as to understand why laughter is often dealt with in a very negative way in pedagogical contexts, this phenomenon should be carefully distinguished from humor or amusement. I build my argument for a smaller part on the basis of conceptual analysis, and to a greater extent on Bakhtin’s work on the transition from Medieval folk culture to Modern civilized culture, in which he claims that a reduction from laughing as a strongly physical experience to mere forms of amusement or humor actually implies that laughter no longer possesses its inherent equalizing and communizing potential. In a sense, laughter forms a threat to any organization of social existence according to similarities and differences in identity and position, and this explains why we usually try to suppress it, or why we try to render it functional in view of the continuation of a societal regime or pedagogical order. More positively formulated, laughter may be said to have an intrinsic educational meaning, because it allows a significant transformation of individual and collective existence.
How does music materialize identities? This article argues that music is instructive in conceptualizing the materialization of identity because it opens up new perspectives on issues of materiality, mediation and affect. These perspectives are intimately related in turn to music's plural socialities, which necessitate a novel approach to theorizing the social. Music, it is proposed, demands an analytics that encompasses four planes of social mediation; while these socialities, with other forms of music's mediation, together produce a constellation of mediations - an assemblage. All four planes of social mediation enter into the musical assemblage: the first two amount to socialities engendered by musical practice and experience; the last two amount to social and institutional conditions that afford certain kinds of musical practice. The four are irreducible to one another and are articulated in contingent ways through relations of synergy, affordance, conditioning or causality. By adopting the topological metaphor of the plane to stand for distinctive socialities mediated by music, the intention is to highlight both their autonomy and their mutual interference. The second half turns to genre theory to suggest that analysing genre in terms of the mutual mediation between two self-organizing historical entities illuminates both how social identity formations may be refracted in music, and how musical genres can entangle themselves in evolving social formations. Finally, with reference to music's capacity to create aggregations of the affected, the article considers the efflorescence of theories of affect, association and entrainment. While such theories illuminate the generative nature of the mutual mediation between musical formations and social formations, they are limited by lack of awareness of the four distinctive planes of music's social mediation, as well as the significance of their autonomy and their contingent interrelations for understanding how music materializes identities.
Aesthetic doctrine hypothesizes a for-its-own-sake, ‘disinterested’ autonomy of music from life and assumes, then, that ‘good’ music exists only to be contemplated, and that proper ‘appreciation’ depends on informed ‘understanding’. This distantiation of music from life creates a gap between aesthetes who have (unfortunately) sacralized classical music and the public who regard music (even classical music) praxially—i.e. as serving various social needs and ‘goods’, absorbed listening being only one. ‘School music’ premised on aesthetic suppositions attempts to elevate taste by 'converting’ students to the sacralized view, with negative results that create an increasing need for ‘advocacy.’ The solution is to acknowledge music as praxis and thus to adopt a praxial approach to teaching that bridges the gap between ‘school music’ and music as used meaningfully ‘in life’. Viewed praxially, music is not to be ‘understood’; rather, mindful use (particularly enthusiastic amateuring) is empirical evidence of ‘appreciation’.
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
The Opera Quarterly 21.4 (2005) 716-724
The Philosophy of François
Châtelet Gilles Deleuze
Translated by Charles T. Wolfe
François Châtelet always defined himself as a rationalist—but
what kind of rationalism? He refers incessantly to Plato, Hegel,
and Marx, but is above all an Aristotelian. What then distinguishes
him from a Thomist? Undoubtedly, it is his way of impugning God,
along with all transcendence. Châtelet terms all forms of
transcendence, all beliefs in another world, outrecuidances
[arrogance]. There never was a more quietly godless philosopher,
except of course for Nietzsche. His is a tranquil atheism, that is,
a philosophy in which God is not a problem—the nonexistence and
even the death of God are not problems, but rather conditions that
should be treated as givens so that the real problems can then
emerge: this is the only humility. Never has philosophy located
itself more firmly within a field of pure immanence.
In our philosophers' jargon, the term for a principle
that is posited as both a source of all explanation and as a higher
reality is transcendence—a pretty word, which I find quite
suitable. Presumptuous types, great and small, from the leader of a
tiny fringe group to the president of the United States, run on
transcendence like a wino runs on red wine. The medieval God has
been dissipated without losing any of his force or deep formal
unity: his avatars include Science, the Working Class, the Country,
Progress, Health, Security, Democracy, Socialism—the list is too
long to give in full. These forms of transcendence have taken his
place (which is another way of saying he is still there,
omnipresent), carrying out their plans for organization and
extermination with increased ferociousness.
Immanence, the field of immanence, consists of a relation
between Potentiality and Actuality [un rapport
Puissance-Acte]. These two notions can only exist in relation
to one another; they are inseparable. This is the sense in which
Châtelet is an Aristotelian. Indeed, he seems to have had a kind of
fascination for power or potentiality: man is power, man is matter.
. . .
Political power does not attract me at all. Being
against power, seeking to "check" its activity—in my view, these
are traps. What interests me is power as potentiality, that which
makes power what it is. Now, potentiality is, strictly speaking,
"one for all." I enjoy actualizing my potential—doing what I can—in
order to understand and disclose the mechanisms of the imprisonment
of power, here and there, when I have "information." Maybe this
keeps my taste for potentiality alive, and awakens it around me.
Potentiality was once a word for freedom.
How does one "act" on something, and what is the act or
actuality of this potential? The act is reason. Notice that reason
is not a faculty but a process, which consists precisely in
actualizing a potential or giving form to matter. Reason is itself
a pluralism, because nothing indicates that we should think of
matter or the act as unique. We define or invent a process of
rationalization each time we establish human relations in some
material form, in some group, in some multiplicity. The act itself,
qua relation, is always political. Reason, as a process, is
political. This may well be the case within a city, but it goes for
other, smaller groups as well, or even for myself—and nowhere but
in myself. Psychology, or rather the only bearable psychology, is
politics, because I am forever creating human relationships with
myself. There is no psychology, but rather a politics of the self.
There is no metaphysics, but rather a politics of being. No
science, but rather a politics of matter, since man is entrusted
with matter itself. The same even applies to sickness: we have to
"manage" it when we cannot conquer it, and thereby impose on it the
form of human relationships.
Consider the case of sonorous matter. The musical scale, or
rather a musical scale, is a process of rationalization that
consists in establishing human relationships via this matter in a
manner that actualizes its potentiality and it itself becomes
human. Marx analyzed the sense organs in this...
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