On the Aesthetics of Music Video

Christopher J ames Emmett

Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of PhD.

I he University o f Leeds, School o f Fine Art, History o f Art and Cultural

Studies.
October 2002

The candidate confirms that the work submitted is his own and that appropriate
credit has been given where reference has been made to the work o f others.

This copy lias been supplied on the understanding that it is copyright material
and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper
acknowledgement.
 Contents

Acknowledgements
Abstract

Introduction

1: Fragments

2: Chora

3: The Technological Body

Conclusion

Appendix: Song Lyrics

Transcription

Bibliography
 Acknowledgements

The bulk of the many thanks owed by me goes first to the University of Leeds, for
the provision of a University Research Scholarship, without which I would have
been unable to undertake the studies presented here, and the many library and
computing facilities that have been essential to my research. A debt of gratitude is
also owed to my supervisor Dr. Barbara Engh, whose encouragem ent and
erudition, in a field of interdisciplinary research that demands a broad range of
expertise, and I have frequently demanded it, has been invaluable. Mention here
should also be made of Professor Adrian Rifkin, whose input at the earliest stage
of my research has done much to steer the course of this work in directions that
only a man of his breadth of knowledge could have imagined.

Thanks also to the administrative staff of the School of Fine Art, History of Art and
Cultural Studies, in particular Gemma Milburn, whose ever available assistance
has helped to negotiate the many bureaucratic hurdles of the last four years, and
kept me in constant touch with a department that has undergone considerable
upheaval during recent years. It is their support that has allowed my studies to
proceed with a minimum of distraction.

Finally, thanks to the other research students, especially my fellow 'noise boys’
Marcel Swiboda and David Fox, whose own fields of interest have frequently
overlapped with my own in productive ways, and who have provided direction both
away from dead ends and towards much of what is presented here. And last but in
no sense least, many, many thanks to my friends and my parents, without whose
unflagging technical and moral(e) support, or ‘nagging’ as I have occasionally
term ed it, this piece of work, for good or ill, would never have seen the light of day.
 IV

Abstract

This doctorate is an attempt to show how music video presents a challenge to

traditional modes of music aesthetics through its resistance to being categorized
as an object. I attempt to show how music video, and by extension all music, is
better conceived of as Text-event rather than as object, and hence formulate the
notion of an aural paradigm based on material presence as opposed to a visual
paradigm based on representation. This draws in particular on the writings of
Roland Barthes and Julia Kristeva, and the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix
Guattari, and also on the very different tradition from which Ludwig W ittgenstein’s
later philosophy originates.

W ithin this framework the idea of a ‘fragmentary aesthetic’ is placed in relation to

its nineteenth-century antecedents, and suggested as a possible methodology for
future analysis. This theoretical base is then used to re-examine both the
argum ents surrounding the music aesthetics of Eduard Hanslick and Richard
Wagner, and ideas drawn from modern physics, mathematics, and system theory,
to develop the ideas of relationality and ‘gesture’ as a means of comparing
different media without compromising the qualities specific to each. Also under
discussion in this context are questions of meaning and narrative as they relate to
music video and recent musicology, and an engagement with the Critical Theory of
Theodor Adorno and W alter Benjamin regarding the role of social mediation in art.
Finally the problems of ideological claims upon the realm of the aesthetic, as noted
by Terry Eagleton, are considered, and the figure of the ‘technological body,’
inspired by Brian Massumi’s work on the concept of proprioception, is proposed as
a means of combining the objective and the subjective realms in a new musical
aesthetic.
 Introduction

In a society which has not yet found peace, how could art cease being metaphysical,
i.e signifying, readable, representative? Fetishist? How long till music, the Text?1

My nominal topic of study, the aesthetics of music video, poses two questions: why
aesthetics, and why music video? I will return to the relevance of aesthetics later,
but with respect to music video, my response does not take the form of a simple
‘because it’s there,' after Edmund Hillary - I do not seek to ‘conquer’ music video,
bend it to my will - but rather takes the form of the confessional. Something, I
knew not what, pricked my consciousness as I encountered music video. The
punctum , of which Roland Barthes speaks in Camera Lucida,2 caught my eye and
my ear; there was, is, a quality of music video that is all its own, beyond the
marriage of music and image alone. Music videos don’t begin to resemble opera,
nor are they quite like films, nor even most television formats. This point was
brought home to me in watching the film Annihilator,3 an execrable film in most
respects, with the sole redeeming feature (at least for me) of having an entirely

1 Barthes, R., Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein,’ in The Responsibility o f Forms: Critical

Essays on Music, Art and Representation, trans. Howard, R., (University of
California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1991), p. 97.
; Barthes describes the punctum as a ‘sting, speck, cut, little hole - and also a cast
of dice. A photograph’s punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises
me, is poignant to me).’ Camera Lucida, trans. Howard, R., (Vintage, London,
2000), p. 27.
3 Annihilator, (1986), dir. Michael Chapman. The music track used here was David
Bowie’s ‘Ashes to Ashes,’ itself the subject of a highly experimental music video
several years previously.
 2

unexplained and unprepared music video-like section midway through the film.
Despite being at least as badly done as the rest of the film, the disjuncture caused
by the abrupt change in register, achieved without any use of visual or aural cues,’
was a vivid demonstration of just how different music video is from film. Indeed,
the sensation of watching music video is probably closer to that of silent film,
paradoxically, than sound film, in the active engagement of the viewer to make
sense of what is presented. (Perhaps the exception to this is the musical number
of the Hollywood musical - the imitation of Busby Berkeley style choreography and
camera angles is seen relatively often in music videos - but even here the
contextual setting of the number within a broader filmic context makes for a similar,
but not identical, affective charge.) The visual effects of music video are frequently
striking, even experimental, and yet if one compares their effect to the
experimental films that Harry Partch set to his music in the 1950s and ‘60s, the
difference between these and music video could not be more apparent.
The only other medium with a comparable aesthetic is that of the
advertisement, drawing on similar visual codes, similarly abbreviated with respect
to narrative convention, and also having a similarly schizophrenic relationship to
the commodity: both advertisements and music videos are promotional tools for
commodities (music videos are known as ‘prom os’ in the music industry), and are
thus intimately tied to the fetishized commodity form, but are themselves only
rarely treated as commodities with exchange value. Music videos are explicitly
designed to perform an action upon the world rather than to take on the status of
passive object. Even with the degree of crossover seen between music video and
advertisements, however, as in the frequent employment of music video directors
to make adverts, there remains a clear distinction between the two form ats in the
prominence given to the music track.4 (There are of course exceptions - witness
the setting of Tony Kaye’s Dunlop tyre advertisement to the Velvet Underground’s

4 See Savan, L., 'Commercials Go Rock,’ Sound and Vision: The Music Video
Reader, ed. Frith, S., Goodwin, A. and Grossberg, L., (Routledge, London and
New York, 1993), pp. 85-90. Although the practice of directors moving between
these mediums has become more common since this was written, the
phenomenon of music videos as advertisements for non-music products described
here was relatively short lived, and thus presumably commercially unsuccessful.
 3

‘Venus in Furs’ a few years ago, or the occasional success of the music tracks to
Levi’s adverts - but these are the exceptions that prove the existence of a rule.)
Having been ‘hooked’ by the punctum I perceived in my interaction with
m usic video, I sought to understand the phenomenon, and turned to what literature
I could find on the topic. It seemed, however, that my interest in music video was
not shared by the many writers that purported to address it: there was no shortage
of discussion, at least in the 1980s, but nobody seemed to be particularly
concerned with the music video text in itself. Most commentators were more taken
with the channel MTV than the videos p e r se,5 and music videos were an example
of this, or a proof of that, but always constituted. Rarely, if ever, was it addressed
on its own terms, and never in terms of the one thing that marked it apart from
other television forms, namely, the music. Many people seemed to be talking
about music video, but few of these seemed to be addressing what they actually
saw, instead of the ideas it represented, and fewer still were bothering to listen to
them. And then, after the initial scholarly intoxication with music video, people
stopped even talking about it. Katherine Dieckmann wrote recently:

Not so very long ago, back in the eighties, or ‘‘The Big 80s" as one short-lived video­
revival show liked to call them, MTV provided fruitful ground for the pop-minded
scholar. The music video was, in fact, often considered the ideal mass cultural artifact.
...My interest in MTV is less theoretical and more pragmatic ... partly because a highly
intellectualized approach to the medium feels just about as dated now as Madonna’s
conical bustier.6

5 One of the very few book length studies, oft cited in music video research, is E.
Ann Kaplan’s Rocking Around the Clock, and yet in her introduction she explicitly
states: Let me remind readers that this book addresses itself not to rock videos in
general but to their incorporation in the institution that is MTV.’ Kaplan, E.A.,
Rocking Around the Clock: Music Television, Postmodernism, and Consum er
Culture, (Routledge, London and New York, 1987), p. 11.
6 Dieckmann, K., ‘MTV killed the music video star,’ in Kelly, K. and McDonnell, E.
(eds), Stars don’t Stand Still in the Sky, (Routledge, London, 1999), p. 89.
 4

In the course of this essay, Dieckmann mentions the work of Andrew Goodwin as
an example of a ‘pop-minded scholar,’ but she neglects to mention that Goodwin
was arguing precisely against the raft of theory produced in the 1980s that treated
music video as an exemplar of postmodernism for exactly as long as it failed to
address the music. Many of the postmodern traits music video and MTV were said
to em body were entirely typical presentations of the experience of live concert
perform ance (for instance, direct address); they only became ‘postm odern’ when
erroneously viewed from the standpoint of mainstream cinema. Music video was
not only the ‘ideal mass cultural artefact,’ but an entirely idealized artefact, a
convenient peg upon which to hang theory. At the time of writing it is ten years
since Goodwin published Dancing in the Distraction Factory,7 a call for a
‘m usicology of the image,’ outlining the need to re-engage with music video as a
musical entity rather than as a branch of film theory, and in the intervening period
there has been an almost deafening silence. The most notable effort of the
handful that have addressed Goodwin is that of Nicholas Cook, as part of a wider
discussion of musical m ultimedia.8 Cook brings a welcome musicological
perspective to music video, but I would suggest that in one key respect he has
replicated the problem identified by Goodwin, and indeed Goodwin himself is also
guilty of this, for instead of understanding music video in terms of music, both
these media are understood in terms of what they mean, a difficult, and very often
not a useful concept when applied to music. Again the material qualities of the
music video are effaced in deference to an ideal category, and as I hope to
demonstrate, this is exactly what a ‘musicology of the im age’ should struggle
against. I would contend that the model in which an artefact is regarded as a
representation of something else, be that another object or an abstract concept, is
a profoundly unmusical one, and based upon a visual paradigm. Indeed, the
process of abstraction involved in the very notion of the ‘idea,’ so often unsuited to
a discussion of sound, is derived from the visual realm. As Jonathan Ree notes:

7 Goodwin, A., Dancing in the Distraction Factory: Music Television and Popular
Culture, (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1992).
8 Cook, N., Analysing Musical Multimedia, (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1998).
 5

'P lato’s use of the word “ Idea" is itself based on its root meaning of “visible form .’” 9
A genuinely musicological response to music video must hence develop a means
of addressing both image and music, and their combination without constant
recourse to the transcendent realm of the ideal: the point is to stop considering
entities as representations, and to start addressing their presence.
It is for this reason that my concern is for an aesthetics of music video: I
wish to understand the affect of a music video, and derive social critique from this,
rather than analysing the social meaning it offers up, which will of necessity simply
be a reflecting back of one’s own prejudice. It should be stressed that this is not
aesthetics understood as a contemplation of the beautiful in music video, but a
return to the original formulation of Baumgarten in his Aesthetics of 1750.
Aesthetics as ‘the business of affections and aversions, of how the world strikes
the body on its sensory surfaces, of that which takes root in the gaze and the guts
and all that arises from our most banal, biological insertion in the w orld.’10 The
original purpose of this, however, was not to provide a challenge to the realm of
reason: as Terry Eagleton points out (and this is discussed in chapter III), it was
precisely in order to separate out and harness the sensuous to Enlightenment
reason that the field of aesthetics was born. One sees here the potential risk of
ideological capitulation involved in music aesthetics, and the reason why Adorno
and modern musicology has been so keen to avoid the purely m usical’ and reveal
musical meaning, an ideological product. The aesthetic realm, however, is not so
easily ordered as it might seem. As Eagleton writes:

To lend fresh significance to bodily pleasures and drives, if only for the purpose of
colonizing them more efficiently, is always to risk foregrounding and intensifying them
beyond one’s control. The aesthetic as custom, sentiment, spontaneous impulse may
consort well enough with political domination; but these phenomena border
embarrassingly on passion, imagination, sensuality, which are not always so easily

9 Ree, J., Philosophical Tales: An Essay on Philosophy and Literature, (Methuen,

London and New York, 1987), p. 65.
10 Eagleton, T., The Ideology o f the Aesthetic, (Blackwell, Oxford, 1990), p. 13.
 6

incorporable. ... If the aesthetic is a dangerous, ambiguous affair, it is because ... there
is something in the body which can revolt against the power which inscribes it.11

As I hope to demonstrate in my re-reading of Eduard Hanslick in chapter II, what

might be regarded as a move to the ‘purely m usical’ is in fact an attempt to bring
out this radical potential of aesthetics, and to uncover the ‘signifiance’ (to borrow
Julia Kristeva’s term) at work within signification and the inscription of meaning. A
renunciation of the quest for meaning in favour of concentrating upon musical
material is not a retreat into the ‘purely m usical,’ because the notion of the ‘purely
m usical’ is based upon a fallacy. Both Mikhail Bakhtin, and in a less overt manner,
Ludwig Wittgenstein, have shown that any form of enunciation is always already
intersected by a range of competing claims and that the word is of necessity a
dialogical entity:

Any concrete discourse (utterance) finds the object at which it was directed already as
it were overlain with qualifications, open to dispute, charged with value, already
enveloped in an obscuring mist. ... The word, directed towards its object, enters a
dialogically-agitated and tension-filled environment of alien words, value judgements
and accents, weaves in and out of complex interrelationships, merges with some,
recoils from others, intersects with yet a third group: and all this may crucially shape
discourse, may leave a trace in all its semantic layers.12

And I believe this is no less true of music than it is of language: every sound,
harmony, musical style, is intersected by all its previous instances of usage in
precisely the same way as language. An aesthetic approach to musical material
need not be a way of ignoring entirely the social dimension of music (although it
very often is, in certain analytic practices), but rather a way of approaching
meaning from a new direction, sidestepping what I termed above a visual
paradigm, predicated upon ideal concepts and a translation of the material into

11 Ibid., p. 28.
12 Bakhtin, M., ‘Discourse in the Novel,’ in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays,
trans. Emerson, C. and Holmquist, M., (University of Texas Press, Austin, 1981),
p. 276.
 7

representation. (One sees here a possible reason for the difficulty of discussing
musical timbre in traditional analytic terms: as that element of music that is most
wedded to the material it resists translation into a representation of something
else, and is hence ignored as being non-meaning, insignificant. The value of
sonorous activity in music cannot be gauged so easily as its meaning. ) The key
to endowing aesthetics with a social dimension is to consider it as a means of
generating analysis through a connection to sensate phenomena, rather than as a
set of ideals (unity, symmetry, etc.) to which one might aspire, and for which
analysis provides a form of ‘proof.’ As Ken Hirschkop puts it: T h e points of
pleasure and tension in our musical experience should lead to questions, linked to
our social experience in general, rather than to aesthetic satisfactions which lead
nowhere.’13 Consequently, this thesis will not take the form of a ‘how to ’ of music
video analysis - analytic strategies must be developed in response to the nature of
the artefact and the context of its reception - but I do wish to set out some
fundam ents of methodology, to suggest the ways in which one might interact with
music video, and the forms that an understanding of this process might take.

II

W hat is required is a new conception of aesthetics, and this in turn demands a new
way of apprehending the object. Barthes writes: ‘Aesthetics is absorbed into an art
of living ... hence, it is less a matter of making pictures than furniture, clothes,
tablecloths, which will have distilled all the juice of the “fine” arts; the socialist
future of art will therefore not be the work (except as a productive game) but the
object of use, the site of an ambiguous flowering (half functional, half ludic) of the

13 Hirschkop, K., T h e Classical and the Popular: Musical Form and Social
Context,’ in Music and the Politics o f Culture, ed. Norris, C., (Lawrence and
W ishart, London, 1989), p. 303.
 8

signifier.’14 Aesthetics ceases to be a straightforward identification of the quality of

an object, and becomes an understanding of the process of interaction between
the subject and the object, the point of symbiosis between them. There is a shift
from an aesthetics of being to an aesthetics of becoming, an aesthetics not of the
work but of the text, and this is something that can only take place within a dialogic
framework, such that the materiality of the object bears the imprint of the social, of
better, the social-material symbiosis is an ongoing event with a particular affective
charge. There is a close analogy with the conception of the wave-particle in
quantum physics: the basis of matter is not exactly a particle, nor exactly an
energy wave, but exhibits qualities of both at once, entity and enaction in one. It is
important to keep this in mind when reintroducing the figure of the body into
aesthetic discourse: the body is not to be regarded as a site of anchorage, a stable
ground that can function as a benchmark against which everything else might be
referenced. The body is itself an activity, a mediation or interaction, unfixed, and it
is a working through of the ramifications of this ‘technological body’ that forms the
basis of chapter III below.
W hat I also hope to show is that the form of this aesthetic response is
som ething demanded by the peculiar nature of the music video artefact, and that
this is a way of entering into what might be termed an aural paradigm, that
operates in a different plane to the visual paradigm described above. Although he
does not explicitly say so, Goodwin implicitly requests a dialogical response to
music video, in stating:

It is important to establish from the outset that pop music is, and always has been, a
multidiscursive cultural form, in which no one media site is privileged. The implication
of this for music video analysis is that it becomes impossible to understand the
meaning of any individual clip without considering its relation to the wider world of pop
culture.15

14 Barthes, R., ‘Brecht and Discourse: A Contribution to the Study of Discursivity,’

in The Rustle o f Language, trans. Howard, R., (University of California Press,
Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1989), pp. 221-2.
15 Goodwin, A., op. cit., p. 25.
 9

It may not be the case that any one medium is pushed to the fore, but what does
take place, as Goodwin notes several times, is that music video makes television
m usical,’16 The nature of the object demands, in contradistinction to the normal
hierarchy, that one understands the image according to the criteria of music rather
than vice versa, or to put it in the terms defined above, one apprehends the image
track in terms of an aural paradigm rather than applying a visual paradigm to the
sound track. In a dialogical aesthetic, the qualities of the image that are important
are not questions of what is represented or what it ‘m eans,’ so much as what are
its material, affective qualities, how does it impact upon the body; the image is
made sensuous, it is musicalized.
This model may be particularly apparent in pop music, and music videos
especially, but as Cook has pointed out dialogism can be observed in all instances
of music:

The aesthetic interaction between image and sound is possible only because music
possesses an intrinsic openness to semantic completion through the intervention of the
image. To the extent that people assimilate what they see and what they hear into a
composite experience, the every day reception of music gives the lie to the ideology of
musical autonomy, according to which the touchstone of good music is hat it is
aesthetically self sufficient.17

Both Goodwin and Cook demonstrate how both popular and classical musics are
already saturated with image, and bound up more generally with the cultures, or
‘form s of life’ to use W ittgenstein’s terminology, of which they are a part, but what I
believe to be new here is the suggestion that the criteria according to which one
perceives these images is potentially altered by their musical association. Which
is by no means to suggest that this always, or even frequently happens: the
representative, meaning-as-product model predominates in appreciation of both
the visual and the musical, but music videos enable a point of entry to the

16 Ibid., p. xvi.
17 Cook, N., T h e Domestic Gesamtkunstwerk, or Record Sleeves and Reception,’
in Composition - Performance - Reception: Studies in the Creative Process in
Music, ed. Thomas, W., (Ashgate, Aldershot etc., 1998), p. 115.
 10

alternative - a holding of the image or the sound en proces, resisting the

temptation to close down the plurality of meaning to an exchange-value. It is not
that meaning is renounced, but in the process of making meaning, the activity of
understanding, the emphasis is shifted from the meaning to the making.
The model of the object is no longer that of the location, the fixed point, nor
any point at all, but rather that of the probability sphere. The possible range of
associations, amalgamations, and affective properties are in orbit around' the
object, but there is no centre to these orbits, nothing to which one might point as
‘the object itself.’ The object, so far as such a thing might still be usefully said to
exist, is the space traced out by the combined loci of these orbits, which can only
ever be partially apprehended and are in a constant state of flux. In the same way
that one cannot pinpoint the path of an electron particle-wave around a nucleus, or
a Baudrillardian event,18 so one’s understanding of one’s interaction with the object
is uncertain, probabilistic; the process of comprehension is a stochastic process.
The way in which one might apprehend this process of comprehension,
give it an understandable form, is the key to how one begins to relate the very
different material affects presented by the different media that make up the music
video composite. Chapter II discusses at length the concept of ‘gesture’ that I
have taken from Wittgenstein, and from Paul Johnson’s discussion of the
‘musicality of language’ in W ittgenstein’s later thought.'9 Putting it in somewhat
reductive terms, gesture is the expression of the trace left by the interaction of the
social and the object, a combination of the materiality of the object and the shaping
of the realization of this material by the social forces acting on its production. The
notion of gesture allows one to reconcile the specificity of each of the media that
make up music video with the fact of their mutual influence upon one another, in
the moulding of space and time that defines the identity of the object.
W hat this model does not allow for, however, is explanation. A dialogically
conceived object cannot be explained, nor even exactly situated, but only related -
a clarification of its place relative to one’s form of life. This is not necessarily a bad

18 See Baudrillard, J., Simulacra and Simulations, ‘ in Selected Writings, ed.

Poster, M., pp. 174-7.
19 Johnson, P., Wittgenstein: Rethinking the Inner, (Routledge, London and New
York, 1993), especially chapter 4, entitled T h e Musicality of Language.’
 11

thing: Wittgenstein was highly critical of both the anthropologist George Frazer and
Sigmund Freud for their attempts to explain rather than clarify the nature of certain
phenom ena,20 and Adorno was not concerned with explanation, and the
implication of origin and non-contingent ‘essence’ that underpinned it. As Jay
Bernstein puts it: ‘Adorno is seeking after historical truth, not the ahistorical,
rational essence of phenomena. Historical truth is “shown” in fragmentary writing,
which does not then explicitly aim to demonstrate of to explain. Explaining and
demonstrating neutralize the phenomena in question; to explain is to explain
aw ay.'21 This echoes well with W ittgenstein’s belief that essence is expressed in
the ‘gram m ar’ of a form of life,22 and that this is not something that can be ‘said,’
but merely ‘shown.’23

Ill

Music video has scarcely begun to be adequately theorized. In part this is due to
problems in musical analysis more generally, and in the analysis of popular music
in particular. The fault lines that run through musicology, and the difficulties of
straddling sociological and musical analysis may be narrowing, but have not yet
closed, and with a genuinely interdisciplinary object such as music video these
problems are multiplied. The eclectic nature of the theories I have brought to bear
on music video in the following study has been in part necessitated by the paucity
of existing literature (with a few well-thumbed cited exceptions), and in part
inspired by the formal and disciplinary eclecticism of music video itself. I have

20 See Cioffi, F., Wittgenstein on Freud and Frazer, (Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, 1998) for details of his criticisms.
21 Bernstein, J.M., Introduction to The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass
Culture, (Routledge, London and New York, 1991), p. 7.
22 Wittgenstein, L., Philosophical Investigations, trans. Anscombe, G.E.M.,
(Blackwell, Oxford, 1967), §§371 and 373.
23 Gier, N., Wittgenstein and Phenomenology, (State University of New York Press,
New York, 1981), p. 110.
 12

already mentioned many of the theoretical works that betray their presence in my
own writing - Barthes, Bakhtin, Wittgenstein. Academic discourse perhaps more
than any other takes the form of a ‘collective assemblage of enunciation.’24 It is in
this spirit, and I freely admit to following Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in this
respect, that I begin each of the three chapters with ‘the prompting of an ancestral
voice.’25 Each of these quotations is the expression of a particular historical
juncture, a moment of intensity, an activity that effects what Deleuze and Guattari
term an ‘incorporeal transform ation,’ a point in which the set of relations that
marked a specific mode of being is changed in such a way as to change the object
itself without altering its corporeal form. It is the intersection of the social and the
material, the moment in which the subject-object symbiosis is broken and reset
from within.
Music video is a varied medium, encompassing many different styles and
codes of music, word, and image, each of which, as suggested above, should be
treated according to its specific requirements. I cannot claim to have deliberately
set out to discuss as wide a range of these as possible; I have instead focussed
upon those few that caught my eye and my ear, and which time and again
prompted me to rethink what it was that so appealed to me. My interest in music
video is not that of the catalogue compiler, but of the aesthete, perhaps even the
dilettante. One might query whether this is a responsible attitude to have taken,
given both the political nature of my conclusions, and the typically uncritical and
ideologically questionable nature of the vast majority of music videos, at least in
terms of their overt content, but it is my belief that all music videos, with very few (if
any) exceptions, embody a form of relationship between sound and image that
contains an incipient critique of the sign-system itself. One can scarcely overstate
the extent to which this critique is held in abeyance, but there is nevertheless a
potency here that may occasionally be perceived, however momentary or
personalized that occasion might be. W hatever the weight of theoretical
knowledge I have brought to the artefact, however, all the conclusions I have

24 Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F., A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and

Schizophrenia, trans. Massumi, B., (Athlone Press, London, 1988). p. 80.
25 Ibid., p. 80.
 13

drawn have been drawn directly from the encounter with the artefact and the way
in which they have impacted upon me.
Much of the following takes the form of a discussion of music aesthetics
rather than explicitly addressing music video, but as I have tried to show in this
introduction, there are sound reasons (no pun intended) for this; what is true of
music is very often true of music video also. The concept of the aural paradigm:'
dialogistic, material, affective, and its distinction from the ‘visual paradigm :’
monologistic, representative, idealized, should not be read as meaning that each is
in any way bound to its corresponding medium. The point is precisely that music
video is a demonstration that these modes of apprehension can be extended
across differing media, and co-exist in the same artefact in different planes.
W hether they are of more general use to musicology as a whole I must leave for
others to decide, but it is my belief that the attempt to combine the sociological and
the ‘purely m usical’ within a single theoretical framework, as begun by Adorno, and
proposed in both the concept of ‘gesture’ and the figure of the ‘technological body’
here, would be of both theoretical and practical use. Music video as an art may
not have entirely ceased to be metaphysical, but it does, to my mind, enable
access to music, and the Text.
 Fragments

27th February 1854, Dusseldorf

Robert got up, but he was more profoundly melancholy than words can say. If I so
much as touched him, he said: “Ah! Clara, I am not worthy of your love.” He said this,
he whom I always look up to with the greatest, the most profound reverence ... ah! and
all that I could say was of no use. He made a fair copy of the variations, and as he was
at the last he suddenly left the room and went sighing into his bedroom - I had left the
room only for a few minutes, in order to say something to Dr. Hasenclever in the next
room, and had left Mariechen sitting with him (for ten days I had never left him alone
for a minute). Marie thought he would come back in a minute, but he did not come, but
ran out into the most dreadful rain, in nothing but his coat, with no boots and no
waistcoat. Bertha suddenly burst in and told me that he had gone - no words can
describe my feelings, only I knew that I felt as if my heart had ceased to beat.1

Robert’s body, on the other hand, as Barthes will point out, continued to beat
strongly, and in a variety of remarkable patterns, on its journey through the streets
of Dusseldorf. If only Clara had the benefit of Barthes’ hindsight, she might have
known: ‘the Schumannian body does not stay in place (a m ajor rhetorical
transgression). It is not a meditative body. It sometimes makes a meditative
gesture, but does not assume m editation’s bearing. ... This is a pulsional body,
one which pushes itself back and forth, turns to something else - thinks of

1 Extract from Clara Schumann’s diary, quoted in Chisell, J., Robert Schumann,
from Master Musician's series, ed. Westrup, J., (Dent, London, 1948), pp. 75-6.
 15

something else.’2 This unsettled (and unsettling) movement, ceaseless flitting,

butterfly-like (Papillon?), is the aesthetic of the fragment - not the much-loved
model of a Romantic com poser’s descent into madness, the mental edifice of
genius disintegrating into a thousand pieces, like the shards of a mirror, nor any
kind of construction at all. Rather it is a coherence, a collectivity, an
amalgamation, a ceaselessly productive corps morcele forever in flux,
reconstituting itself as new parts are thrown into the mix. Certainly it is the mind of
Freud, divided against itself, the fragmented decentred subject of modernism, but it
is a great deal more besides, loosely woven into a totality-yet-to-come, a dynamic
matrix of identity, both distinct from, and utterly embedded in the world.
Consider for a moment the American suburban party scene of the video to
R.E.M .’s ‘Imitation of Life.’ It takes the form of a conspicuously everyday (if
som ewhat wealthy) ‘slice o’ life,' in the setting of a poolside gathering, and it is also
very much a momentary slice, consisting as it does of a mere twenty seconds of
footage repeated backwards and forwards some eleven times in the course of the
video, with the addition of a short conclusion (backwards footage of a small girl
blowing out cake candles). The scene is quite literally composed, in the
etymological sense of placing things together as a composite, being made up of a
series of distinct groupings that cover the social demographic one might expect.
All human life - that is, all American suburban human life - is here: an elderly
couple, a group of young adults dancing, men gathered around a barbeque,
parents with younger children, to name but a few, as well as several solitary
figures, including the three members of R.E.M., all of whom remain as distinct and
identifiable entities throughout. A partial overview of the entire party scene is
available only for brief instances, as the camera zooms in and out of the picture to
pick up enigmatic events and poses. I am reminded of a scene in the film
Bladerunner (and it would not surprise me if this was also true of the director of the
video, Garth Jennings), where Harrison Ford’s Dekker uses a machine to closely
examine a photograph, zooming in and examining minute details of the photograph
that he seemed able to sense but not accurately comprehend without clarification,
(and with a corresponding problem of picture quality that gives this video an

2 Barthes, R., ‘Rasch,’ in The Responsibility o f Forms, trans. Howard, R.,

(University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1985), p. 300.
 16

unusual grainy character). This is the phenomenon that Barthes mentions in a

brief aside in T h e Rhetoric of the Image,’ when he describes ‘Continuing to
explore the image (which is not to say that it is not entirely clear at the first
glance.)’3 Although one may physically apprehend everything the music video has
to offer, both its aural and visual affect, instantaneously, this is more than can be
consciously understood in that instant - one knows more than one can say. Thus
the task of the analyst is not to explain, but to clarify the experience, for as
W ittgenstein puts it, ‘Since everything lies open to view there is nothing to
explain.’4 One must extrapolate the instant affect into the dimension of time, such
that the analytical process becomes a fundam entally nostalgic activity.
There is an important difference, however, for where Dekker starts with an
entire photograph, the world beyond the frames unconsidered (insofar as this is
ever true), in this video the holistic picture may never be glimpsed - one
understands it through the dynamism and interaction of the distinct elements from
which it is comprised. Through a clarification of the fragmentary components of an
image, a thorough understanding of the detail available - and there is no end to
the depths of this detail - one is encouraged to look beyond the confines of the
frame, since there is more detail within the frame than it can comfortably contain.
A dialogic relationship between music video and wider world is established. There
is a simultaneous appeal to the particular and the holistic, and an establishment of
a dynamic synergy between them both; looking, Janus-like, both inwards and
outwards, is the aesthetic of the fragment. Indeed, many of these concepts are
bound up with the field of aesthetics in general. As Eagleton notes:

This fusion of general and particular, in which one shares in the whole at no risk to
one’s unique specificity, resembles the very form of the aesthetic artefact. ... For the
mystery of the aesthetic object is that each of its sensuous parts, while appearing
wholly autonomous, incarnate the “law” of the totality. Each aesthetic particular, in the

3 Barthes, R., ‘Rhetoric of the Image,’ in Image Music Text, trans. Heath, S.,
(Fontana, London, 1977), p. 34.
4 Wittgenstein, L., Philosophical Investigations, trans. Anscombe, G.E.M.,
(Blackwell, Oxford, 1967), §126.
 17

very act of determining itself, regulates and is regulated by all other self-determining
particulars.5

W hich is to say, it is not the 'parts’ that constitute this model, so much as the set of
relations between them, and as such, the foremost problem of the ‘aesthetic
artefact’ is also its greatest strength: the object becomes impossible to fix, its
boundaries forever fluid, since it is collapsing in on itself at the same tim e that it is
exploding outwards into the world.
Perhaps more so than any other format, the music video simultaneously
proclaims its autonomy and fails to fulfil that promise. As the supplementation of
the ‘pop’ single with an image track, it might be regarded as the ultimate fetishized
commodity, replete in itself as object, but this is far from being the case. The
presentation of spectacle in the music video is almost entirely unique, comparable
only to the television channel ‘ident’ (that is, the short segments between
programmes designed to establish the character of the channel) in the way the
image is presented. (Music videos are also unusual in that, as a collective
enterprise, subject reception is already embodied in the poietic process.) Their
com modity status, as promotional tools, is uncertain like that of advertisements;
unlike most advertisements, however, music videos reject most of the strategies of
mainstream film: in the near permanent use of direct address to camera, a
conspicuous absence of narrative, and a privileging of the striking image (what
Barthes terms a ‘pregnant m oment’6) over any commitment to continuity that might
denote a sense of self-containment. Music video is above all a parasitic medium,
constantly looking outside itself for contextualization and any sense of meaning; a
music video rarely, if ever, offers meaning - one must always make meaning from
it, or not, as will be discussed later. W hat I hope to demonstrate is that, as Andrew
Goodwin suggests, music video performs a musicalization of the image, an

5 Eagleton, T., The Ideology o f the Aesthetic, (Blackwell, Oxford, 1990), p. 25.
6 Barthes, R., 'Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein,’ in The Responsibility o f Forms, op. cit.,
pp. 93ff.
 18

extension of an aural paradigm into the visual realm (in a reversal of the usual
hierarchy), as is frequently suggested in Barthes’ discussion of ‘the text.’7
This process, however, will not take place without first examining historical
precedent; as Barthes notes: T o criticize ... is to put into crisis, something which is
not possible without evaluating the conditions of the crisis (its limits), without
considering its historical moment.’8 In order to explicate the fragmentary qualities
of the music video, it is necessary to first explore the aesthetic of the fragment as it
first appeared in the late eighteenth century. The historical proximity of the
development of the field of aesthetics, and that of the literary form of the ‘fragm ent’
in the late eighteenth century was not mere serendipity. The potency and flexibility
of thought this mode of W eltverstandnis enables generated a range of analytical
possibilities, adopted into artistic formats by the Jena circle around the likes of
Friedrich Schlegel and Jean Paul, beloved by Schumann. W hen Schlegel
famously wrote that: ‘A fragment should be like a little work of art, complete in itself
and separated from the rest of the universe like a hedgehog,’9 he clearly meant
this to say as much about the nature of the work of art as about the fragment. This
should not be taken as an argument in favour of the separation of art and world, at
least not in the sense of a straightforward autonomy - a hedgehog is no more
separate from the universe than the sun or the moon; rather it is constitutive of that
universe, in however small a way, and the same is true of the artwork, with a
similarly ill-defined boundary point. A frequently cited musical example of this is
Schum ann’s ‘lm wunderschonen Monat Mai,’ the opening song from the
Dichterliebe cycle, which in terms of functional harmony begins with the sequence:
ii74'3, V7 in F# minor, before resolving into A major on the entry of the voice, and

7 One might offer as examples, passages of S/Z, the statement that ‘listening
bears within it that metaphor best suited to the ‘textual,’ (footnote in 'The Third
M eaning,’ in Image Music Text, op. cit., p. 53), or the close of ‘Diderot. Brecht,
Eisenstein,’ op. cit., ‘How long till music, the Text?’ (p. 97).
8 Barthes, R., ‘Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers,’ in Image Music Text, op. cit., p.

208.
9 Quoted in Rosen, C., The Romantic Generation, (HarperCollins, London, 1996),
p. 48. The following reading and discussion owes much to Rosen's chapter

‘Fragm ents’ in this book.

 19

concludes with the same sequence, finishing on the dominant seventh chord. The
effect in performance is one of profound ambiguity, and serves to project the song
both forwards and backwards in time by implying both an unheard prologue and a
continuation of the song. Although this is a particularly impressive and beautiful
example, the same effect is produced less artfully in innumerable pop songs that
employ the familiar fade-out of a repeated chord sequence. A better example is
that of the video to Basement Jaxx’s ‘Jus’ 1 Kiss,’ which opens as if ‘cutting in’ on
a held synthesizer chord, and a black screen with a disembodied head moving
slowly around the very edge of it, moves to a muffled introduction with ‘home
video’ footage of Basement Jaxx before the song proper. (N.B. There is a
disjunction between sound and image here, the image track ‘proper’ starting
several seconds before the sound track ‘proper.’) Then to close there is more
‘home video' footage of Felix Jaxx starting up the beginning of the song again on a
portable stereo. As with ‘lm wunderschonen Monat M ai’ the music video is
projected both backward into its own pre-existence, and forwards, continuing in
another realm after its cessation in this world. This example also illustrates well a
further technique common to the Romantic fragment, that of its disjunction from
reality, or at least the problematizing of this relation. Time and again in Romantic
literature one sees either points of self-referentiality and overt situating of the
author/narrator, or else the text is consciously other-worldly, as in that most
fam ous of literary fragments, Coleridge’s Kubla Khan, subtitled as a fragm ent’ and
preceded by the story of the caller from Porlock.10 The poem is ruptured both
internally, by its constant shifting of metre, and physically by the break at line 37
(‘A damsel with a dulcimer ...’) that marks a shift in tone from story-telling to
personal (dream) recollection, and externally, ‘from the rest of the universe,’ by its
fantastical content and its conscious labelling as ‘a fragm ent.’ The artefact is
fragmented both at the level of its context and at the level of the work, and no
doubt a close reading would reveal further disjunctions amongst the words
themselves.
This multiple layering of fragmentation could be achieved musically in a
single gesture via a technique employed repeatedly by Schumann, that of musical

10 The introduction was prefixed in its 1816 publication. See Coleridge: Poetry and
Prose, ed. Garrod, H.W., (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1925), pp. 180-1 for details.
 20

quotation. Of course musical quotation did not originate with Schumann - the
cantus firm i of medieval polyphony were frequently based on popular melodies;
there are dozens based upon ‘L’Homme Arm e’ alone.11 However, whereas earlier
quotation was integrated into the structure of the new piece - disguised, in effect -
Schum ann’s use of it goes to some lengths to mark it out, both by shifts of rhythm
and of texture, as in the insertion of a section of one of his own earlier works,
Papillon, into the ‘Florestan’ section of Carnaval. As Rosen states: W hat is
revolutionary here is not the introduction of a quotation from another work but the
way it is made to sound like a quotation. If Schum ann’s directions are faithfully
carried out, the phrase will appear to be an intruder from somewhere else, even to
those who have never heard another work by Schum ann.'12 Both the form of the
piece 'Florestan,' and its musical status as an autonomous work are thrown into
doubt, but the way in which Schumann introduces the quotation, first as a
momentary, hesitant, one bar fragment, then as a more completely recalled
melody, and finally absorbed into the texture of the piece, throws the relationship
between sound and world, music and listener, into an even more complex relief.
The use of this quotation, and even its labelling with a question mark in the score,
is clearly a model of musical recollection, and the way in which that memory is
then incorporated into the context of its recollection. The scraps of memory that
float into consciousness are clarified and then recontextualized in relation to
current circumstance - the dialogical relationship between past and present that is
essential to all musical appreciation is here made flesh, or rather, tone. As Rosen
dem onstrates this technique is used again on a larger scale and with greater
facility in Schum ann’s Phantasie, which works and reworks a melodic fragment
from Beethoven's An die Fem e Geliebte into a complex hierarchy of memories,
and concludes: T h e phrase of Beethoven is made to seem like an involuntary
memory, not consciously recalled, but inevitably produced by the music we have
just heard. A memory becomes a fragment when it is felt as both alien and

11 See, for example, Lockwood, L., A spects of the ‘L’Homme A rm e’ Tradition,’

Proceedings o f the Royal Musical Association, 100, (1974), pp. 97-122.
12 Rosen, C., op cit., p. 99.
 21

intimate, when we are aware that it is as much a sign of the present as of the
past.’13
Carolyn Abbate has stated that ‘Music has no past tense,’14 in that it
flattens everything out onto the level of discourse, but I would suggest that music is
nothing but past tense. Music involves a temporal displacement, like the
Bedingnis of Heidegger: T h e sounding, ringing, vibrating of language that goes on
in excess of explanation,’15 the reverberation of history from which one constructs
understanding. All experience of music is an experience of pastness, and takes
the form of recollection, in that one apprehends music as the impact of sound
waves upon the body, as vibration and resonance, as the affective trace of an
event that has already taken place. As Bjork puts it, ‘I miss you, but I haven't met
you yet, I remember, but it hasn’t happened yet.’16 Hence, listening to music is an
exercise in nostalgia, trying to hold still what has already passed, a continual
construction of what has been, that puts the subject into temporal flux, and undoes
the notion of presence. This is perhaps somewhat ironic, since it was suggested in
the Introduction that the application of an ‘aural paradigm ’ was supposed to focus
attention precisely on the issue of presence, rather than representation.
‘M usicalization’ simultaneously poses the question of presence and effaces it - it
focusses attention there only to disappoint. But in so doing, it refines the notion of
affect, which with music is inherently a communal phenomenon, transgressive of
spatial boundaries, and also inextricably bound up with the formation of memory.
Thus the memorization of the musical fragment takes on a Proustian quality, that
of the memoire involontaire, as an infolding of the sensory impact of air molecules
in motion, that is shared by all who have had the same experience. One might
compare this to a passage of Asafiev, in which he discusses the memorization of
melodic fragments by a community as a whole, such that they:

13 Ibid., p. 112.
14 Quoted in Nattiez, J.-J., ‘Can One Speak of Narrativity in M usic?’ Journal o f the
Royal Musical Association, vol. 115:2, (1990), p. 244.
15 Bruns, G.L., The Otherness of Words: Joyce, Bakhtin, Heidegger,’ in
Postm odernism - Philosophy and the Arts, ed. Silverman, H.J., (Routledge, New
York and London, 1990), p. 136.
16 Gudmundsdottir, B., ‘I miss you,’ on the Post album.
 22

Enter into oral tradition as living intonations. ... Beyond the compositions themselves
lies the world of music as the activity of the mass public consciousness, from little more
than sound interjections, at times simply rhythmic intonations, and from characteristic
universally loved melodic figures, to more developed melodic shoots and harmonic
turns.17

The idea that there is a corpus of musical fragments that constitute some form of
cultural memory, one that must inevitably interact with the experience of both old
and new music, is a powerful one, and is something to which I will return in chapter
III. For now, however, it is sufficient to state that the dialectic between the
experience of music and musical experience, consciously exploited and rendered
overt by Schumann, is already bound up in the phenomenology of music, and that
the form at of this phenomenology is necessarily a fragmentary one.
An attempt to combine world and music, although to rather different ends,
is not unfamiliar to musicologists. The field of musical biography feeds upon the
presumption that connections can be drawn between the two, and in its most
disreputable form will demonstrate the precise parallels between the situation and
disposition of the composer, and the musical works that flow ineluctably from this
state of being. The intention is to provide both a narrative fram ework and unifying
creed to an often disparate corpus of work, as well as to explain the organic
genesis of each individual piece, and given the nature and type of Schum ann’s
output it is unsurprising that he has been particularly prone to such treatment. And
Schumann himself did little to dissuade anyone from trying their hand at a little
am ateur psychology; the works are peppered with biographical details, to such an
extent that the simplistic, one-to-one mapping, unidirectional (which is to say a
passage from life to work) model becomes difficult to sustain. If we return to
Carnaval for a moment, which in the words of Lawrence Kramer approaches an
ideal subject precisely through a kind of fragm entation,’ there is a superabundance
of biographical material provided freely by Schumann, insofar as all of ‘the
miniatures that make up this collection are either character sketches or dances,

17 Asafiev, B., quoted in Monelle, R., Linguistics and Semiotics in M usic, (Harwood
Academ ic Publishers, Chur etc., 1992), p. 277.
 23

that is, personal or social im ages.’18 Not only do we have the divided self-image of
the composer expressed in the ‘Florestan’ and ‘Eusebius’ sections of the piece, but
the form er of these, as mentioned above, quotes from one of his own earlier
works. Sections continually run into one another, complete one another
harmonically, making a mockery of the idea of a stable and chronologically ordered
identity. The usual musicological solution to this thorny problem is to seek refuge
in the cryptic ‘Sphinxes,’ a set of three pitch motifs derived from the lettering of his
own name, and from two alternate musical ‘spellings’ of his then fiancee’s home
town, which are used to convey unity upon the Carnaval set. This conveniently
overlooks, however, both the parts of the set unrelated to the Sphinxes, and more
obviously the fact that there are three Sphinxes, which although related in pitch
content are clearly distinct. To portray this as being a unity of sorts is to wilfully
ignore a much simpler explanation; it is what Julia Kristeva terms a ‘plural
totality,’19 a multiplicity of interacting fragments, coherent but not coterminous.
It is a paradox that probably would have delighted the Jena circle, that the
idea of the fragment as an important mode of expression coincided with the
emergence of the aesthetic principles of organicism and unity. This in part
explains the unique position of Schumann in music history, at once admired and
derided, who as primary inheritor of the ideas of the Jena circle in the field of music
produced work of undeniable quality, while failing utterly to conform to the criteria
that would later become the yardstick of compositional ability, that is, the
Schenkerian ideal of large-scale compositional direction and unity. Schumann not
only appears to fail according to this standard, but at times seems almost hostile to
the idea, and yet his music has a formal brilliance all of its own, a status that
stands outside the box of the autonomous art work. Rosen writes:

The Romantic fragment is a closed structure, but its closure is a formality: it may be
separated from the rest of the universe, but it implies the existence of what is outside
itself not by reference but by its instability. The form is not fixed but is torn apart or

18 Kramer, L., Music as Cultural Practice, 1800-1900, (University of California

Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1990), p. 210.
19 Kristeva, J., Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Waller, M., (Columbia
University Press, New York, 1984), p. 101.
 24

exploded by paradox, by ambiguity, just as the opening song of Dichterliebe is a

closed, circular form in which beginning and end are unstable - implying a past before
the song begins and a future after its final chord.20

This ability to generate a formal alternative, a means of resistance, if you will, to

the dominant musical aesthetic of the time has not won Schumann a great many
friends, but his contribution to theory has not gone unnoticed: it is surely more than
coincidence that leads Barthes to note that Gilles Deleuze and himself are among
‘the only Schumannians I know.’21
And yet there is a danger in the model of the fragment put forward by
Rosen, or rather there is a temptation. The ambiguity between art and world so
carefully created and nurtured is under constant threat - Rosen at one point
describes the fragment as ‘incom plete’ in content, the suggestion being that the
world might enter in to complete it, that the fragment only projects outside itself so
that the world might endow it with meaning, permit it a raison d ’etre. In Deleuzean
terms, the fragment no sooner performs a deterritorialization than it invites a
reterritorialization upon a new content. I do not regard this model of analysis as
either useful or desirable. My aim is not to ‘establish the truth of the text, but its
plurality (however parsimonious); the units of meaning (the connotations) ... will
not then be regrouped, provided with a meta-meaning which would be the ultimate
construction to be given them .’22 In the words of Friedrich Schlegel’s namesake
Margaret, ‘Only connect.’23 The fragmentary text is above all a generative text, a
cue to recollection and reflection, and the key qualities of the Romantic fragment
are its ambiguity and playfulness, as described by Novalis in his manifesto for a
new kind of literature:

Narratives, without connectedness, but with associations, like dreams. Poems - just
sounding well and full of beautiful words - but also without any sense or
connectedness - at most a single strophe that is understandable - like so many

20 Rosen, C., op. cit., p. 51.

21 Barthes, R., ‘Loving Schumann,’ in The Responsibility o f Forms, op. cit., p. 298.
22 Barthes, R., S/Z, trans. Miller, R., (Blackwell, Oxford, 1990), p. 14.
23 Forster, E.M., Howards End, (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1941).
 25

fragments of the most different kinds of things. True poetry can, at most, have an
overall allegorical sense, and make an indirect effect, like music.24

Erzahlung, ohne Zusammenhang, jedoch mit Association, wie Traume. Gedichte -

bloss wohlklingend und voll schoner Worte - aber auch ohne alien Sinn und
Zusammenhang - hochtens einzelne Strofen verstandlich - sie mussen, wie lauter
Brauchstucke aus den verschiedenartigen Dingen seyn. Hochstens kann wahren
Poesie einen allegorischen Sinn im Grossen haben und eine indirecte Wirkung wie
Musik etc.25

(It should be noted that the German Zusamm enhang implies a considerably more
tightly bound relationship than the English ‘connectedness;’ Rosen translates it as
‘logic.’) And it is this model of the fragment, formulated by Novalis in response to
the dreamlike qualities of fragmentation and association he perceived in music,
that is taken up by and realized in the form at of music video.

II

The recruiting of music as an art form to varying aesthetic banners has a long and
ignoble history that spans the nineteenth century, and which must act as a
fram ework of understanding for Novalis’s manifesto. There is little to choose
between Hegel’s assertion that music could not express concepts and was
therefore essentially worthless, and the stance of Hoffman et al which formed a
rather too easy connection between m usic’s indecipherability and ‘the ineffable,’
thus granting music the status of the art to which others might aspire, and all this
before one even begins to address the concept of the 'purely m usical.’ Amongst
the fog and smoke of philosophical war, in which the aim of all parties seemed to

24 Translation taken from Treitler, L , ‘Mozart and the Idea of Absolute M usic,’ in
Music and the Historical Imagination, (Harvard University Press, Cambridge,
Mass., 1989), p. 184.
25 Original German taken from Rosen, C., op. cit., p. 76.
 26

be the claiming of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony to each’s own standard, there are
any number of contradictory positions, the complexities of which would form a
lengthy book in its own right (for an overview of these issues, see Carl Dahlhaus’s
The Idea o f Absolute Music26), but a few key points do emerge. Prime among
these are the questions of meaning and music, and narrative and music.
The issue of locating meaning in music is sufficiently troublesome to have
been almost entirely avoided by traditional musicological analysis; one can’t help
but suspect that Schenkerian analysis is as much about studiously ignoring the
social complexity of music as with constructing something genuinely immanent to
its material qualities. Even the Baroque period’s interest with ‘the affections' or the
Enlightenment's ‘passions,’ while interesting in themselves, are clearly means of
substitution for the category of meaning, deliberate or not. One possible
conclusion which might be drawn from this is that the concept of meaning is simply
not a particularly useful or relevant one in relation to music, and there is a sense in
which this view has some merit, but the problem that needs to be explicated here
lies in the use of the blanket term ‘meaning.’ The concept of ‘musical m eaning’
covers a sufficiently broad range of competing arguments as to require a
distinction between different sorts of ‘m eaning:’ is the reference to denoted or
connoted meaning, semiotic or sem antic meaning, ‘extra-m usical’ meaning, or
even a Barthesian ‘third meaning’ (the obtuse, as opposed to the obvious27). The
concept of music as directly denoting meaning, as language does, is impossible to
sustain, and as such analysis of the ‘purely m usical,’ be it Schenkerian,
paradigmatic analysis, or pitch-set theory (although as Robert Snarrenberg has
suggested, in Schenker’s case this is due to a deliberate stripping down of
Schenker’s thought to its positivistic aspects alone28), has fought shy of even
addressing the question of meaning. But this is not to say that it lacks any sense

26 Dahlhaus, C., The Idea o f Absolute Music, trans. Lustig, R., (University of
Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1989).
27 These terms are discussed and defined in Barthes’ essay T h e Third Meaning:
Research notes on some Eisenstein stills,’ Image Music Text, op. cit., pp. 52-68.
28 Snarrenberg, R., ‘Competing myths: the American abandonment of Schenker’s
organicism ,’ in Theory, analysis and meaning in music, ed. Pople, A., (Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge, 1994), pp. 29-56.
 27

of meaning - as Raymond Monelle suggests, ‘Music never seems m eaningless’29

- simply that they have given up trying to say what it is. W hether ‘seem ing’ to
have meaning is the same as being meaningful is not something that Monelle
elaborates on, however.
The notion of connotative meaning in music, which is to say an implied
meaning, is much more readily accepted, and forms the basis of most musical
criticism. This places musical meaning in orbit around the object, rather than at its
heart, such that meaning is not something immanent to the object, but ‘extra­
m usical.’ It might be suggested, however, that this is due to a flawed model of the
musical object and the concept of immanence, rather than the implied
im poverishment and second handness’ of extra-musical meaning. There is a
strain of music theory that attempts to combine musical analysis with the so-called
extra-m usical,’ by treating music as a semantic system. As with connoted
meaning, music is understood in relation to its social background, such that
‘meaning ... arises as a function of context,’30 but rather than simply reflecting the
social qualities of its reception in some way, it also becomes a direct expression of
the set of social relations that are involved in its forming. Many writers in this field
have arrived at similar conclusions having started out from differing stances: Boris
A safiev’s outlook was so radically social as to almost cross over into
phenomenology, in that he believed musical comprehension was fundamentally
rooted in cultural experience, so that ‘Each listener ... begins an auditory
acquaintance new to him [s/'c.j through recognition and comparison as to whether
there are elements in it of intonations familiar to his consciousness,’ or as Monelle
puts it: T h e comprehension of music can only begin with the familiar. . . . No work
can be wholly new, or it would be wholly incomprehensible.’31 David Osmond-
Smith and Robert Hatten converge on the same point from opposite sides, the
form er beginning with an iconic understanding of musical representation, and
acknowledging the cultural and historical basis of this, and the other showing how
musically expressive devices may become ossified into cultural units, respectively,

29 Monelle, R., op. cit., p. 17.

30 Tomlinson, G., T h e Web of Culture: A Context for M usicology,’ Nineteenth
Century Music, 7, (1984), p. 355.
31 Monelle, R., op. cit., p. 278.
 28

to the extent that ‘there seems no difference in identifying established cultural

content in a musical gesture, from recognizing the “meaning" of a linguistic
m orphem e.’32 In terms of musical analysis, the net effect of this is to change the
question ‘what does this mean?’ into ‘how does this mean?,’ as is suggested by
Kofi Agawu. However, this shift brings into play a range of other forces that
A gaw u’s analytic system seems to have difficulty coping with.
One of the most obvious consequences of a semantic approach to
analysing musical meaning is the proliferation of a multiplicity of meanings;
meaning is so utterly underdetermined in the musical text that any attempt to
restrain the resulting semantic promiscuity is doomed to failure. Agawu notes this
tendency, stating: ‘It seems more useful, in the face of the multiplicity of potential
m eanings of any single work, to frame the analytical question in terms of the
dimensions that make meaning possible.’33 Rather than celebrate this multiplicity,
however, Agawu seeks to curtail it, continuing: ‘Only then can we hope to reduce
away the fanciful meanings that are likely to crop up in an unbridled discussion of
the phenomenon, and to approach the preferred meanings dictated by both
historical and theoretical limitations.’34 This ‘reduced’ meaning is derived from an
observation of a dialectic between the inner workings’ (p. 72) of the piece (the
‘purely’ musical, which is no less so for Agawu’s use of scare quotes (p. 51)), and
hermeneutically constructed ‘topics’ of the classical period, which are broadly
speaking, ‘extra-m usical.’ There are several dubious assumptions here - there is
a w hiff of ‘telling it as it really w as’ hanging over the set of topics he arranges, but
more important is his failure to ask by whom were these meanings preferred, and
why, and the lack of a dialectical relationship of the piece to the socialization of
reception. One might compare Agawu’s shift from the w hat’ to the how’ of
musical meaning with Nicholas Cook’s statement that: ‘Instead of talking about
meaning as something that the music has, we should be talking about it as
something the music does (and has done to it).’35 The notion of music as process

32 Ibid., p. 270.
33 Agawu, K., Playing with Signs: A Semiotic Interpretation o f Classic Music,
(Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 1991), p. 5.
34 Ibid., p. 5.
35 Cook, N., Analysing Musical Multimedia, (Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 9.
 29

implicit in A gaw u’s ‘how does it m ean’ is invoked only to tie down music all the
more securely, and without reflection on what this meaning means. Understanding
meaning in music was clearly untenable and unanswerable in the form of a ‘w hat’
question, but having moved to a ‘how’ question Agawu shies away from its
ramifications.
Music ceases to be a thing, ein Ding, in Heidegger’s terms, and becomes
an event, Bedingnis, and the consequences of this for meaning are potentially dire,
or liberating, depending upon one’s standpoint. Both Cook and Chris Small effect
the change from musical object to musical event, or ‘musicking,’ as Chris Small
term s it,36 and both choose to reinstate meaning as a function of the interactions
that are set in place, rather than attempt ‘to escape the tyranny of m eaning.'37 The
tendency of meaning is always to become product rather than process, an
idealizing and fixing of something that is in flux. To make a sound event mean
something is to stop it being a sound and make it into something else, an ideal
category, stripped of its materiality and ontologized. As Adorno states in Aesthetic
Theory: T h e movement toward the negation of meaning was exactly what
meaning deserved,’38 (and I shall return to Adorno and the status of meaning in
chapter III). And in a system where musical meaning can be convincingly
com pared with the exercise of social power, as Jacques Attali has shown,39 the
resistance to fixing meaning, and of remaining en proces, is one of political
engagem ent through a form of refusal to play the game that has been set out in
advance: ‘It is a political task ... to undertake to reduce communication
theoretically to the mercantile level of human relations and to integrate it, as a
simple fluctuating level, to significance, to the text, an apparatus outside of

36 Small, C., Musicking: The Meanings o f Performing and Listening, (Wesleyan

University Press/University Press of New England, Hanover, NH, 1998).
37 Barthes, R., T h e Grain of the Voice,’ in Image Music Text, p. 185.
38 Quoted in Bruns, G.L., T h e Otherness of Words: Joyce, Bakhtin, Heidegger,’
op. cit., p. 120.
39 Attali, J., Noise: The Political Econom y o f Music, trans. Massumi, B., (University
of Manchester Press, Manchester, 1985).
 30

m eaning.’40 An understanding of music as event, as Text, is thus not based upon

a model of representation, which involves making music into something other than
sound, idealized, but a stochastic process: one apprehends in parts, fragments,
which when taken together will trace out the space (and time) the event inhabits,
resonates in, and which is in a constant state of flux. Meaning is not destroyed,
but cut adrift of its moorings, pluralized, such that there exists a 'theatrical state of
meaning ... organized in associative fields, paradigmatic articulations.’41
Indeed, it is perhaps this very quality of fecundity, allied to the reticence to
address meaning in music, which might explain the dearth of many practical
examples of the use of this mode of analysis in music. This atomization of the idea
of the musical work, a double move, inward to the scraps of sound that constitute
the work, and outward into the web of association woven around each of these,
creates a considerable problem when it comes to the compiling of practical
analyses. Perhaps the best attempt, certainly the most complete, at getting to
grips with this is seen in Phillip Tagg’s analysis of the ‘Kojak’ television theme tune,
in which he devoted an entire doctorate to the workings of a fifty second-long piece
of music. His technique of ‘interobjective com parison’ (IOC) was undoubtedly
labour intensive, requiring the collating of evidence from across the musical
spectrum to back up his assertion of what were basically cultural ‘truths’ (e.g., the
connection between rising horn calls and heroic status), but it nevertheless
demonstrates the awesome scope of potential in even the shortest extract of
sound material. Consequently, I would suggest that any working out of practical
examples of musical meaning will be more likely to take the simple form of Simon
Frith’s ‘Accordions played in a certain way ‘m ean’ France, bamboo flutes, China’42
[quotation marks on ‘mean’ added] following the model that Cook suggests in
stating that a musical object ‘attracts referents in the same sense that a magnet

40 Barthes, R., ‘Kristeva’s Semeiotike,’ in The Rustle o f Language, University of

California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1989), p. 170.
41 Barthes, R., T h e Rhetoric of the Image,’ op. cit., p. 48.
42 Frith, S., Tow ards an aesthetic of popular music’ in Music and Society: the
politics o f composition, performance and reception, ed. Leppert, R., and McClary,
S., (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1987), p. 148.
 31

attracts iron filings,’43 than to Tagg’s tortuously complex methodological

paradigm .44
The question of narrative in music follows on from that of meaning, and is
similarly complicated by the variety of different claims that have been made in its
name. The division between traditional and ‘new’ musicology that took place in the
late 1980s confused the issue still further, since ‘narrativists’ tended to fall into the
‘new’ camp and were hence grouped together, regardless of the ways in which
their ideas contradicted one another. Relating music to narrative can take the form
of a wide range of different practices, some of which are more enlightening than
others, but all of which I believe to involve treating music in a profoundly unmusical
way. W hich is not to say, however, that I regard all uses of the term narrative in
music as being necessarily incorrect, and even a very tight proscription of what
constitutes narrative can prove illuminating when applied to music in particular
ways. The use of ‘narrative’ in discussions of music became a means by which
musicologists might set themselves apart from the 'purely m usical’ style of
analysis, and much of this work provided a welcome alternative that gave fresh
insight to analysis. Lawrence Kram er’s comparison between the multiplicity of
voices in Beethoven and Schumann (and Freud) and narrative effects in literature
of the same period, cited above, is a case in point,45 and the nineteenth century
approach to music criticism often means that there are sound hermeneutic reasons
to include a consideration of narrative in any analysis. One must be careful,
however, to make the distinction between something that narrates, and something
that narrativizes, after Hayden W hite46 - much of the work in this area is involved
not in analysing music as narrative, but music as like narrative; it shows the ways
in which narratives and music are formally analogous, but ignores their material

43 Cook, N., ‘The Domestic Gesamtkunstwerk, or Record Sleeves and Reception,’

in Composition Performance Reception: Studies in the Creative Process in Music,
ed. Thomas, W., (Ashgate, Aldershot etc., 1998), p. 115.
44 Given in Tagg, P., 'Analysing Popular Music,’ Popular Music, 2, (1983), p. 46.
45 Kramer, L., op. cit., pp. 176ff.
46 White, H., T h e Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality,’ in On
Narrative, ed. Mitchell, W.J.T., (University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London,

1981), pp. 1-23.

 32

incompatibility. Indeed, discussing music in terms of narrative (and even Barthes’

remarkable attempt to discuss narrative in terms of music47), never goes beyond
analogy, and leaves us none the wiser as to the narrative capabilities of musical
material.
To state that a given piece of music is a narrative is to imply several things,
and not simply that there is some form of story attached. Firstly, there is the
suggestion that we have some form of teleology here, that there is a directed goal,
a product, at the end of a chain of linked events. Clearly in a model that has
fragmented the musical object into a series of associative webs that may be
tenuously, if at all connected, this is a difficult idea to sustain. If one privileges the
paradigm atic over the syntagmatic, the fragment over the totality (although the
equivalence paradigm/fragment - syntagm/totality is only a provisional one; one
cannot separate the individual fragment from the totality to the same extent that a
paradigm might be viewed apart from the syntagm in which it is immersed), one
immediately makes the idea of any kind of coherent narrative problematic.
Secondly, one implies the existence of a distinction between what is variously
term ed ‘fabula’ or story, and its expression, ‘syuzhet’ or discours. Since the
denotative qualities of music are so vague as to be non-existent it is difficult to
maintain a separate musical story and an order of narration, m usic’s ‘story’ is its
means of expression, its content-plane and expression-plane are indivisible
(although not indistinguishable). Furthermore, most theories of narrative rely on
the receiver being able to reference some kind of verisimilitude, in order to gauge
the relation between ‘story’ and ‘discourse,’ but however well bound into the world
music might be by reference, the occasions on which it represents that world,
cuckoo calls, onomatopoeic sounds, are vanishingly rare, making the concept of
verisimilitude in music nonsensical. If music is to be regarded as narration, and go
beyond being analogous, it must fulfil the rules outlined above, namely, that it
engenders an interaction between a represented actuality and a discursive
practice. Leo Treitler is somewhat cagey on the fine distinction between narration
and narrativity, but acknowledges the bipartite model and agrees that it is
interaction between the two aspects that creates narrative, writing: ‘Central to the
functioning of narrativity is the interplay between two intersecting patterns: the

47 Barthes, R., S/Z, pp. 28-30.

 33

chronological sequence of the events’ occurrence, and the order of their unfolding
in the telling.’48 However, I believe that in distilling the complexities involved in
representing reality down to the simple matter of chronological time, Treitler has
m isrepresented the full scope of narrative. Thus when he states

The apprehension of a musical work depends, in quite similar ways, on two intertwined
processes: on the one hand the underlying patterns of conventional genres and implicit
constraints arising from the grammar of style (harmony, voice-leading, and so on), and
on the other the progressive interpretation o f these determinants through the unfolding
of the work in time. The first dimension is not exactly like the chronological sequence
of the events of a story, but it is the counterpart in being the dimension of the
determinants that are more or less fixed prior to the unfolding.49

one might be forgiven for not taking this as proof of m usic’s narrativity. Indeed, as
stated above, music’s affect confuses and complicates the linearity of the
temporal. The problem, if it might be termed so, for music is its inability to
reformulate the real, to represent, in any recognizable form, a reality outside of
itself.

Both Carolyn Abbate and Jean-Jacques Nattiez take a different tack,

focussing on the ability of music to ‘narrativize’ rather than to narrate,' and at times
explicitly distance themselves from other approaches: ‘When music is explained as
the direct enactment of what might be called “promusical objects,” then it is denied
discursive latitude, for it is read as being events, and not reformulating or
recounting them .’50 And Abbate explicitly states: T h e fact that music thus lends
itself to description as such a “narrative” does not actually constitute immanent
narrativity.'5' As with Cook and Small with regard to musical meaning, Nattiez and
Abbate recognize that the musical object is in fact not only object but act: ‘I

48 Treitler, L., Music and the Historical Imagination, (Harvard University Press,
Cambridge, MA, and London, 1989), p. 186.
49 Ibid., p. 190.
50 Abbate, C., Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth
Century, (Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 1991), p. 27.
51 Ibid., p. 28.
 34

propose that we understand musical narration not as an omnipresent

phenomenon, not as a sonorous encoding of human events or psychological
states, but rather as a rare and peculiar act.’52 This act, however, is not permitted
by Abbate and Nattiez to remain as sonorous acting for any length of time, and is
instead returned to the system of communication as musical ‘discourse.’ Nattiez
states: T h e narrative, strictly speaking, is not in the music, but in the plot imagined
and constructed by the listeners from functional objects. ... For the listener, any
“narrative” instrumental work is not in itse lf a narrative, but the structural analyses
in m usic o f an absent narrative.’53 Once again, music is reconceived as activity
simply to become a different product, a translation of ‘the idea.’ To understand
music as narrative, whether that be as ‘narration’ or as ‘narrativizing,’ is to tie it in
place, so that it becomes just another way of inscribing a pre-existing social order,
a place where the subject might enter in to complete production, but never say
anything new.

Music does not lie, because of necessity the task of linking these phantoms of
characters to suggestions of action will fall to me, the listener: it is not within the
semiological possibilities of music to link a subject to a predicate. ... If, in listening to
music, I am tempted by the “narrative impulse,” it is indeed because, on the level of the
strictly musical discourse, I recognize returns, expectations and resolutions, but of what
I do not know. Thus I have a wish to complete through words what the music does not
say because it is not in its semiological nature to say it to me.54

Thus, through narrative, the word is invited in to fulfil what sound alone could, or
perhaps would, not - the formation of a product, the completion of communication,
the constitution of the subject. T h e predicate is always the bulwark with which the
subject’s imaginary protects itself from the loss which threatens it.’55 Nattiez
recognizes the misapplication of predication to music, the refusal of sound to
transfer directly the subjectivity of the composer in the poietic process, but then

52 Ibid., p. 19.
53 Nattiez, J.-J., ‘Can One Speak of Narrativity in Music?,’ op. cit., p. 249.
54 Ibid., pp. 244-5.
55 Barthes, R., T h e Grain of the Voice,’ op. cit., p. 179.
 35

reinstates this in the aesthesic realm, rejecting the aural paradigm, signifiance, in
favour of the visual.
If music is so readily co-opted to a ‘visual’ model, by which I mean one
based upon secure representation, so as to enable clear meaning-product to be
communicated, it might be thought that the medium of music video would
accom plish this all the more readily. W hat I wish to argue, though, is that this is
precisely what does not happen; certainly they are an invitation to narrativize,
perhaps more so than music alone, and some are more susceptible to this than
others, but in the main it is remarkable how resistant music videos are to narrative
and any sort of secured meaning. Images, like sounds, are held en proces,
instead of being communicative of product. Music videos enable one to resist the
tem ptation of the ‘narrative im pulse.’ (It would be a mistake, however, to conclude
that pop m usic’s resistance to narrativization is in an explicitly anti-narrative
stance, as certain post-modernists would have it: the work of Kaplan,56 amongst
others, misrepresents music just as much as those that would ‘read’ a musical text
like a newspaper.) Perhaps this is less surprising if one acknowledges the type of
music that music videos are typically formed around, which is to say, the three
m inute pop song; this immediately prevents the development of any kind of
extended story. As Richard Middleton notes: ‘If pop songs are “little plays,” as has
been suggested, they are mostly sketches of situations rather than lengthy
dram atic narratives.’57
The raising of the status of music to dominant partner in the music video
com posite is prompted not only by aesthetics, but also by practicalities of music
video production, where the soundtrack precedes the image track in all but a
minute number of cases. As such, sound provides the template to which the
image must be accommodated. Furthermore, this process binds the act of music
reception into the poietic process itself, so that the making of the image takes the
form of a response to the music, and the music video is collectivized at the level of
its incipience. One might compare this to Theodor Adorno's criticism of the

56 See Kaplan, E.A., Rocking Around the Clock: Music Television, Postmodernism,
and Consum er Culture, (Routledge, London and New York, 1987).
57 Middleton, R., Studying Popular Music, (Open University Press, Milton Keynes,
1990), p. 224.
 36

W agnerian Gesamtkunstwerk on the grounds that ‘the Gesamtkunstwerk is

founded on the bourgeois “individual” with his soul,’58 which he contrasted with a
model not wedded to the concept of individual ‘genius.’ ‘A valid Gesamtkunstwerk,
purged of its false identity, would have required a collective of specialist planners
... in which each person would take up the work at the point where another has to
give it up.’59 Although I would be wary of applying the term Gesamtkunstwerk, with
its considerable theoretical ‘baggage,’ to the music video format (a point discussed
in detail in chapter II), it certainly approaches the model that Adorno puts forward
here. All of which serves to demonstrate that if one wishes to understand music
video, or start to analyse it, one would do well to begin by adopting an aural, rather
than a visual paradigm: issues of representation and narrative should be rejected
in favour of affect and spatio-temporal relation. Above all, the prompting of
material selection and analytic strategy should come first from the video artefact
itself, rather than the importing of analytical techniques from elsewhere.
In contrast to the connections that were frequently drawn in discussions in
the 1980s, music videos are not little film s,60 and as Andrew Goodwin and many
others have noted, the imposition of film theory upon music video analysis has
tended to conclude that music videos are failed narratives.61 For example, even
Kobena Mercer’s analysis of Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller,’ a video’ almost unique in
the lengths it goes to in order to appear ‘film ic,’ (running to fifteen minutes,

58 Adorno, T.W., In Search o f Wagner, trans. Livingstone, R., (Verso, London and
New York, 1991), p. 110.
59 Ibid., p. 111.
60 There are any number of examples, but a good one is Lawrence G rossberg’s
comparison of the stylistics of 1980s ‘brat-pack’ films to music video, in T h e Media
Economy of Rock Culture: Cinema, Post-modernism and Authenticity,’ in Sound
and Vision: The Music Video Reader, ed. Frith, S., Goodwin, A., and Grossberg,
L., (Routledge, London and New York, 1993), pp. 185-209.
61 Goodwin, A., Dancing in the Distraction Factory: Music Television and Popular
Culture, (University of Minneapolis Press, Minneapolis, 1992). Goodwin is
particularly critical of Kaplan and Fiske for misinterpreting video events under the
rubric of postmodernism when they can be explained straightforwardly by attention
to musical practice.
 37

com plete with opening and closing credits, and made by an established film
director), eventually ‘acknowledges that there is no “plot” as such: the narrative
code that structures the story has no story to tell. Rather it creates a simulacrum
of a story, a parody of a story, in its stylistic send-up of genre conventions.’62
Notably, in his attempt to identify the narrative of this video, Mercer, in common
with Kaplan et al, almost entirely avoids any mention of the actual music, referring
only to its lyric (word) content. Conversely, if one approaches the music video as a
‘making musical of the television im age,’63 any consideration of narrative becomes
largely incidental. In Carol Vernallis’s words: T h e use of the musical section as
the fundam ental unit places an emphasis upon varied repetition of materials over
linear developm ent.’64 It is not that the idea of narrative is entirely absent from the
world of pop; just that it is not located at the level of the music video artefact.
Quoting Goodwin once more: ‘characterization, fiction, and perhaps even narrative
itself exist in popular music at the point of narration, outside the diegesis of
individual songs, live performances, or video clips, through the persona of the pop
star.’65 This phenomenon is not limited to music video - Barry King has written on
the existence of the same process at work in cinema,66 and the refocussing of
identity upon the ‘personality’ of the star constitutes what Benjamin terms false
aura.’67 However, in music video, unlike in film, it provides a mechanism by which
a visual paradigm might be reasserted, and confers a unity that is not present at
the level of music video text.
In order to understand music video analytically, then, first one must
generate and identify, both materially and relationally, a set of fragments that can

62 Mercer, K., ‘Monster Metaphors: Notes on Michael Jackson’s Thriller,' in Sound

and Vision: the Music Video Reader, ed. Frith, S., Goodwin, A., and Grossberg, L.,
(Routledge, London and New York, 1993).
63 Goodwin, A., Dancing in the Distraction Factory, p. 70.
64 Vernallis, C., T h e Aesthetics of Music Video: An analysis of Madonna’s
‘Cherish,” Popular Music, 17, (1998), p. 169.
65 Goodwin, A., op. cit., p. 103.
66 King, B., Articulating Stardom,’ in Stardom: Industry o f Desire, ed. Gledhill, C.,
(Routledge, London and New York, 1991), pp. 167-182.
67 This point is made by Middleton, R., op. cit., p. 66.
 38

be observed paradigmatically and, where relevant, syntagmatically, to produce a

clarification of ‘metonymic residues:’68 not simply to cut up and compare. One
should also bear in mind the ideologically charged nature of music video reception:
it is important that the fragments are genuinely generative of something new, and
not m erely a reproduction of the ‘star-text’ from which they were derived.
Quite apart from the issue of a ‘m usicalization’ of the television image,
which is at least potentially contentious, there is a further reason to suppose that
the discussion of meaning and narrative in music above is directly transferable to a
theorization of music video analysis. The rejection of the autonomous musical
object as outlined above, and its replacement with the concept of music-in-the-
world, is contingent upon the idea that music is always-already bound up with a set
of ‘non-m usical’ entities, to the extent that the distinction musical/extra-musical
becomes impossible to draw clearly. In short, the range of extra-musical ideas and
objects brought into play by the conjunction of music and image in a music video is
more properly an amplification of a process already at work than a qualitative shift
in the way that music is perceived, particularly so in the field of pop music. As
Goodwin notes: ‘[It] is not a case of video imagery transforming pop meanings so
much as an example of a video clip building on the visual codes already in play. It
is an important point for the argument about “fixing” meaning, because such a
phenomenon would be significant only if it could be shown that video routinely
offers a closing off of the potential readings of songs.’69 It is frequently stated that
‘a picture is worth a thousand words,' but the truth of this statement is just as often
missed, for it is equally true to say that a word might be worth a thousand pictures,
and a sound worth more again. The process of translation between specific art
forms is always inexact and accompanied by polysemy, so that a composite art
form such as music video has the potential for almost unlimited interpretation. In
practice many of these possibilities are closed off, others are amplified and brought
to the fore, but like Terry Eagleton’s description of the Hegelian dialectical system,
the music video 'never leaves anything entirely behind.’70 Of course pop music
has always cultivated this process - the musical careers of Elvis Presley and the

68 Monelle, R., op. cit., p. 315.

69 Ibid., p. 11.
70 Eagleton, T., op. cit., p. 144.
 39

Beatles are indivisible from their films, press photographs, and record covers in the
popular imagination, let alone more recent m anufactured’ pop acts, but this is a
feature of all music in W estern culture, of the very idea of musical culture. Cook
writes:

Musical cultures are not simply cultures of sounds, nor simply cultures of
representations of sounds, but cultures of the relationship between sound and
representation. The cohabitation and confrontation of different media are inscribed
within the practice of Western classical music (and perhaps of all music), in the
relationship between sound and verbal discourse. It is in this sense that music, even
“music alone," should properly be seen as a form of multimedia in which all the
components but one have been forced to run underground, sublimated or otherwise
m arginalized.'1

This is the theoretical fram ework that one must enter into in order to develop a
practical methodology of music video analysis.
What, then, is it that I perceive in the presence of music video? W hat are
the qualities that persist in the memory after I have turned away from the screen?
The answer, at once banal and profound, is that I perceive many things in a
simultaneity, or rather, a series of simultaneities. Not the vertical disjunction of
sound, word, and image, but a syntagmatic disjunction of sound/word/image
complexes, each satiated and replete with incipient meaning, and yet
simultaneously dependent upon its connection with a broader (social) context, for
none of these complexes is received in isolation - I perceive a syntagmatic
disjunction, but as a precondition of this I perceive also the presence of syntagm, a
relationship Vernallis describes as ‘the here and now of the video, its moment-to-
moment flow.’72 To rephrase this in terms of my earlier model, as a set of
fragm ents that cohere to form something other (I hesitate to say more, though that
is undoubtedly what I mean) than the sum of their collective parts. The fragmented
address of the music video necessarily draws one’s attention to the social totality

71 Cook, N., Analysing Musical M ultim edia, p. 270.

72 Vernallis, C., op. cit., p. 175.
 40

of which it is a part: ‘Direct discourse is a detached fragment of a mass and is born

of the dismemberment of the collective assemblage; but the collective assemblage
is always like the murmur from which I take my proper name, the constellation of
voices, concordant or not, from which I draw my voice.’73 Fragments are not joined
in a linear relationship, according to the logic of the syntagm, but by an associative
process according to the relationships it enables, association without end or
beginning, a point discussed in detail in chapter II. Perhaps because of its
unusualness, Befremdung, this trend is most apparent at the level of the image. I
am struck repeatedly by a certain quality of the music video image, a constant
desire to exceed itself, a striving for iconic status as if every moment sought to
become as exemplar of itself, a poster image summation of the music video and
that which it enacts in one.
One of the most extreme examples of this trait, and it is more pronounced
in som e music videos than in others, is seen in The Strokes’ ‘Hard to Explain.’ The
im age-track is constituted almost entirely from stock footage, intercut with a few
seconds of ‘home-movie’ rehearsal footage, and ‘unnaturally’ staged performance
footage of the band afloat on a studio lake. These images of the band are then
placed in contiguity with footage of B52 carpet bombers, 1980s television shows, a
boardroom presentation, cartoon dinosaurs, a close up of the wiring on a silicon
chip, an ice-skating chimpanzee in black and white, and a long list of other equally
memorable and ‘resonant’ images, none of which appear for more than a few
seconds. Almost all of these are then repeated, speeded-up, in a different order,
in the showing of thirty-five different pieces of footage in the last twenty-three
seconds of the video. Any one of these images might have been spun out into a
longer story, such is their import, but no linking material is provided, no way of
connecting these images is offered, but must instead be generated in the act of
reception, if at all. Even in those examples of videos where a single image is held
throughout, as in the close-up on Sinead O ’Connor’s head in Nothing Compares 2
U,’ or the Spike Jonze-directed video of a burning man running down a street in
slow motion, held in shot for over three minutes in playing time (only for him to
climb onto a bus at the end of the street), the emphasis is firmly placed upon the

73 Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F., A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and

Schizophrenia, trans. Massumi, B., (Athlone Press, London, 1988), p. 84.
 41

visual material presented, the ‘sensuous image' in Benjamin’s terms, rather than
any sort of storyline.
One might theorize this as being a visual corollary to the musical concept of
the ‘hook,’ the aural signature of a pop single designed to ‘catch’ the listener, but it
is not, I think, a phenomenon entirely unique to the music video format, even if its
specific context and mode of construction are. Compare Barthes' response to the
films of Eisenstein: ‘no single image is boring, we are not forced to wait for the next
one in order to understand and be delighted: no dialectic (that interval of patience
necessary for certain pleasures), but a continuous jubilation, consisting of a
summation of perfect m oments.’74 Indeed, Eisenstein’s own conception of the
audio-visual montage approaches the techniques common to music video: ‘the
centre of gravity is no longer the element “between shots” - the shock - but the
element “inside the shot” - the accentuation within the fragm ent,’75 and it seems
there is a connection between this perceived quality of music videos, and that
quality of film that troubled Barthes, which he labelled the ‘obtuse m eaning.’
Barthes eventually drew this quality from the film still, although it should be noted
that ‘the still’ is rather different to the photograph that the term conjures in the
m ind’s eye: it is defined as ‘the fragment of a second text whose existence never
exceeds the fragment, film and still find themselves in a palimpsest relationship
without it being possible to say that one is on top of the other or that one is
extracted from the other.’76 Given this complex reciprocal relationship, it is fair to
say that there is a sense in which the music video more closely resembles a set of
stills than it does film: it resembles a set of fragments excised from a film that does
not exist. There is, however, an important difference, for whereas the primary aim
of Eisenstein’s was a representation of ari idea, ‘the historical meaning of the
represented gesture,’77 through the image, from which a third, obtuse, meaning
escaped, there is no such aim in music video. The music video fragm ent is an

74 Barthes, R., ‘Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein,’ op. cit., p. 92.

75 Quoted by Barthes, R., in T h e Third Meaning: Research notes on some
Eisenstein stills,’ op. cit., p. 67.
76 Ibid., p. 67.
77 Barthes, R., ‘Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein,’ op. cit., p. 93.
 42

‘anaphoric gesture without significant content ... razed of m eaning.’78 W here

Eisenstein’s image disrupts the ‘Organon of Representation’ almost in spite of
itself, in music video there is only disruption, instituted by music against
representation.79
This quality of music video, utterly pervasive but difficult to bring into focus
and pin down, may ultimately be the reason why Mercer concludes that the
‘Thriller’ video is not a true narrative, despite considerable efforts to convince the
reader (and perhaps himself) otherwise, and is rather a ‘simulacrum of a story.’
Indeed, it explains why so many attempts to read videos as film leads inevitably to
the conclusion that they are failed narratives. And yet as Mercer also notes, these
videos are not without story, devoid of any trace of narrative: in fact very often the
reverse is true, the videos brim over with the suggestion of storylines, both internal
and external to the artefact, back-stories that remain untold, relationships alluded
to but never made clear. In short, an enigmatic and ambiguous character that
defiantly underdetermines almost every aspect present. Music videos may lack
true narrative, but they are not entirely without narrative, nor are they in any way
anti-narrative: rather in place of narrative we have the gesture of narrative, a kind
of pseudo-narrativity. Vernallis notes: ‘Because no parameter comes to the fore to
the annihilation of another (although features become submerged or move into the
background), multiple storylines can seem to exist simultaneously in the video.
The viewer must consider all the visual gestures and all the musical codes in order
to understand the connections among these m om ents.’80 This radical polyvalency,
which music video shares with the musical object, seems to be one of the defining
qualities of the music video. There is a barely restrained proliferation and
interaction of semes, an absence of any hierarchy that might enable one seme to
counteract another, so that the music video does not make sense, it makes
senses, always multiple, always pluralized.
At this point, the music video artefact resembles nothing so much as an
anarchic mess, and in many respects this is entirely correct. An understanding of

78 Barthes, R., in T h e Third Meaning: Research notes on some Eisenstein stills,’ in

Image Music Text, op. cit., p. 62.
79 See Barthes, R., ‘Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein,’ p. 89.
80 Vernallis, C., op. cit., p. 176.
 43

the structure(s) of the artefact does not necessarily produce an analytic order, and
to do so arbitrarily would be an injustice to the material of investigation. To reduce
the play of disorder that characterizes the music video to an explicable linear order
would be a pointless exercise, and say little or nothing about the supposed object
of investigation: better to enter into that spirit of play, to map out, rather than iron
out, the complex weave of meaning and non-meaning. The Romantics, too,
struggled with the relationship between chaos and order in the artistic fragment.
Schlegel explicitly opposed the chaotic and the fragmentary, while still trying to
incorporate the idea of the chaotic, as a m etaphor for the disorder of everyday
experience, into the symmetrical order of the artistic form, writing: Rhyme must be
chaotic, and yet as chaotic with symmetry as possible. From this can be inferred
the system of Romantic m etre.’81 W hat the Romantics were unaware of was that
the chaotic is not necessarily without order, and it is on this point that my
conception of the fragment is markedly different from the Romantic fragment.
Modern mathematics has uncovered the way in which simple ordered units can
generate apparently chaotic systems, with unpredictable results, or at least results
that can be gauged only as probabilities rather than certainties. (This same
mathematics has generated the model of the fractal image, of which more
elsewhere.) The music video, then, is truly chaotic, in that although its actuality
cannot and should not be distorted into order, its mode of construction, the means
by which this actuality was arrived at, can be understood and modelled.
The model which most accurately describes the workings of the production
of meaning (and non-meaning) is that outlined by Greimas in his Structural
Sem antics,82 which although directed specifically at the structure of language can
be adapted to shed light on a range of other possibilities. His method divides
language into the basic linguistic component of the lexeme, which might be
approximated very broadly to a word or group of words, and which can be further
broken down into its constituent elements of meaning, semes. Each lexeme is a
complex of semes, a ‘stylistic constellation,’ some of which are permanent and
invariant’ forming a ‘semic nucleus,’ and others are only contextually related and

81 Rosen, C., op. cit., p. 95.

82 Greimas, A.J., Structural Semantics: an attempt at a method, trans. McDowell,
D., Schleifer, R. and Velie, A., (University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1983).
 44

thus are ‘contextual semes.’ In any group of lexemes there must be set of semes
in common in order for them to be meaningful, but similarly there will be semes
that point in other directions outside of the intended meaning, a kind of semic
residue that appears to resemble what I have elsewhere termed an associative

Figure 183

complex. In the normal course of affairs certain isolated contextual semes will
recur and create what is termed ‘redundancy,’ while other contextual semes fall
away, remaining only as an invisible trace of language, as a necessary condition of
intelligibility. ‘Redundancy sets in at the moment when a discourse begins to
become intelligible; without redundancy language is meaningless nonsense, while
too much redundancy creates m eaningless repetition.’84 It is my contention,
however, that this process, while fundam entally the same, is somewhat altered in a
multimedia instance (using Cook’s terminology). In a music video the anchoring
semic nucleus’ is not ‘permanent and invariant’ to anything like the sam e degree,
whilst the ‘contextual sem es’ are infinitely more numerous, invoking not only the
am biguity of poetic language in the lyrics, but also the polysemy of the rhetorical
image and of music. As a result the process of redundancy is much less clear - it
is possible that there will be enough recurring semes to enable the m ultiplicity of
'senses’ that one sees emerge - and subsequently the ‘invisible trace’ of
m etonymic residue is never repressed to the same extent that it is in everyday

83 Diagram taken from Monelle, R., op. cit., p. 234.

84 Ibid., p. 235.
 45

language. This vast array of contradictory information is not eliminated, but held in
play as a ‘m eaningless’ backdrop to the plurality of meanings available. Hence the
categories of ‘m eaning’ and ‘non-m eaning’ are hopelessly intertwined, dependent
upon one another, creating the chaotic structure of the music video outlined above:
order, such as there is, must be sought at the level of the music video equivalent of
the lexeme, the fragment, the ‘stylistic constellation,’ while understanding will be
found in the warp and the weft of their enmeshment.

Ill

What, in the meantime, has happened to Robert Schumann? W here has his flight
into the rain-soaked streets of Dusseldorf, his head filled with sound (tortured by
the music of both angels and demons), taken him? Clara’s diary cannot help - she
knows only part of the story - but perhaps Barthes can shed some light on his
situation.

Plural, lost, panicked, the Schumannian body knows (at least here) only bifurcations; it
does not construct itself, it keeps diverging according to an accumulation of interludes;
it has only that vague idea (the vague can be a phenomenon of structure) of meaning
which we call signifiance. ... Music, in short, at this level, is an image, not a language,
in that every image is radiant, from the rhythmic incisions of pre-history to the frames of
comic strips. The musical text does not follow (by contrasts or amplification), it
explodes: it is a continuous big bang.85

It is at this point that Robert Schumann's body has become musicalized,

fragmented, event. Physically and mentally he is effecting an incorporeal
transform ation86 of himself into the act of fragmentation. Clara’s diary and Barthes’

85 Barthes, R., ‘Rasch,’ op. cit., pp. 301-2.

86 On the notion of incorporeal transformation and its attribution to bodies, see
Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F., op. cit., pp. 80-7, and further discussion in the
conclusion below.
 46

‘Rasch' have become the speech acts through which Robert Schumann is made
music, a set of movements (variations?) in which is expressed divergence,
accumulation, radiation, explosion: all of those qualities that are attributed to the
musical event and the music video. Schum ann’s precise line of flight through
Dusseldorf, resonating with the involuntary pre-memories of sounds unheard,
remains unspoken, however, until the point at which he arrives at the Rhine
Bridge, and it is only much later that Clara will learn, in a fragmentary and
piecemeal fashion, that the men who returned him to his home were the same
fisherm en that had dragged him from the water; and it is as this radiant image of a
man falling into the water and re-emerging plays through my mind, that it dissolves
into a video picture, and I remember (involuntarily) my object of investigation,
R.E.M .’s ‘Imitation of Life.’ Thus forms the ‘constellation of voices ... from which I
draw my voice,’87 and in the ‘jum p-cut’ I make from Schumann falling into the
Rhine, to a scene from ‘Imitation of Life,’ I at once strip the image of its obvious
meaning, making it sensuous rather than ideal, and reset meaning as activity, an
intermingling of bodies’88 en proces.
If the music video is a demonstration of fragmentary form, then 'Imitation of
Life,' incomplete, plural, vague, and radiant, is Exhibit A. The divergent quality of
the music video image track is emphasized here, as described earlier, by a spatial
separation of distinct ‘types;’ the lyrics are deliberately obtuse, peppered with non-
sequiturs, and are dispersed amongst the characters in such a way as to
problematize and pluralize the notion of ‘author;’ the music track consists of
melodic scraps which cross and recross the traditional structural divide (verse,
chorus) of the pop-song form, while superficially maintaining that structure. In
short, identity, representation, autonomy, all are called into question during these
twenty seconds of video, a fragment that is itself fragmented, reversed and
repeated some eleven times during the course of the music video composite.
Indeed, the unfolding of the video is such that alongside every moment of
congruence between sound, lyric, and image there are also several disjunctures,
which will in turn become conjunct in later repetitions, so that as Bjork suggests,
one remembers, though it hasn’t happened yet.

87 Ibid., p. 84.
88 Ibid., p. 86.
 47

I have discussed the construction of the image track in very general terms
earlier in the chapter, but the effect of this is mainly to enable a focussing of
attention upon the wealth of detail present, far more than one could hope to
com prehensively address. Furthermore, there are a series of possible frameworks
for understanding these images: the ‘party scene’ totality of the video text, the
m acro-text of R.E.M. as a successful band known for their ‘folk-rock’ style of
music, as well as the lyric and soundtracks, and all or some of these frameworks
are being intuitively employed simultaneously in the activity of reception. Several
images immediately catch the eye: the burning man diving into the pool (before re-
emerging as the video reverses), that first drew me from my Schumannian reverie.
This image resembles a film image, wrenched from context, and functions
specifically as a metonym of the Hollywood action movie, belonging to the
category of ‘the stunt-man spectacle.’ It is at once somewhat at odds with the
suburban setting of the video, and with the ‘folksy’ aspect of the R.E.M. public
image (present here in the tone of the mandolin), and yet also chimes with the
repeated phrase of ‘that’s Hollywood’ that forms part of the chorus (although it is
not precisely coincident with this utterance), and the more general seme
surrounding pop and rock music of ‘American entertainm ent.’89 Thus there is an
immediate setting up of conflicting conceptual realms at play here, which are taken
up by another image spatially contiguous with the burning man, that of bass player
Mike Mills filling a champagne fountain. This is more a cultural indicator of high
living, a sign of plenitude and excess associated with (over-indulgent) rock stars
and sport stars (and I am thinking particularly of the oft shown footage of George
Best in a similar pose), but is again at odds with the axis suburban/folksy. The
image gains further poignancy from the association of R.E.M. with alcoholic excess
a relatively short time after a widely reported incident of Peter Buck’s being drunk
and disorderly on an aeroplane, a ‘classic’ rock-star moment (and no doubt the
reason for its being widely reported, despite his subsequent acquittal). A third
striking image is that of guitarist Peter Buck, the only diegetic sound source in the

89 It is probable that this combination (or conflict) of ‘suburban’ values and

Hollywood ‘glam our,’ as well as the video’s setting, is drawn from the Douglas Sirk
film Imitation o f Life, one of his so-called ‘wom en’s pictures’ of the 1950s, which
were distinguished by a distinctively Hollywood take on suburban life.
 48

video save for very brief moments of Stipe singing, playing his tradem ark
mandolin. He is focussed on only in passing, although frequently in shot, perhaps
echoing the status of his instrument, that provides near constant background
arpeggiation, but never comes to the fore of the soundtrack. W hat is remarkable is
his use of dark glasses and slightly stilted and detached deportment, the
implication seeming to be that of blindness, which when combined with the w itch’s
fam iliar he has with him (an ape) conjures the figure of the seer. Once again this
is a highly unusual personage to be present at a suburban party, and is suggestive
of a position outside the video, an ability to see a ‘truth’ that is beyond the scene
portrayed, perhaps loosely connected with the idea of recognizing the distinction
between ‘im itation’ and ‘life’ that the title sets in play. All of the images here are
resonant, rather than merely representative - they overtly point outside of
themselves, functioning as ‘texts’ rather than simple objects. It is in conjunction
with the lyric and sound tracks, however, that the sensuous qualities of these
images are put into play.
Like the image track, the lyrics consist of a series of ‘radiant’ phrases that
are without any overarching ‘sense’ - they exist as a coherence rather than as a
unity (see Appendix for complete lyric sheet). The opening stanza immediately
puts into play a set of disparate concepts, and even the opening line, ‘Charades
pop skill,’ free from any obvious meaning, sets a whole series of ideas in process.
The word ‘charades,’ referring to a similarity of gestural form, invites one both to
reconsider the ungainly backwards dancing with which the video begins, and also
to consider the question of representation put into play by the title and following
line, ‘imitation of life,’ as well as suggesting the party game of the same name that
involves guessing gestural equivalents. There are points that clearly resonate with
the image track - several water references (‘water hyacinths,’ koi in a frozen
pond’), and a ‘folksiness’ to the concise phrasing and grammar of ‘that sugar cane,
that tasted good,’ and the figure of ‘this lemonade,’ the lemonade stall being the
quintessence of suburban Americana, but there is only one brief moment of direct
connection, where the ‘teenager, cruising in the corner’ is directly represented.
Equally there are many phrases entirely at odds with the scene: a ‘Friday fashion
show,’ and the set of phrases grouped under the seme ‘natural disaster’ -
hurricane, tidal wave, avalanche, etc. - which are palpably playing against the
image track, and pointing elsewhere, i.e. outside the video scene. However, the
 49

sections of the lyrics that are most clearly articulated, and of greatest interest, are
those voiced by characters in the video. Some of these are diegetic, the shouting
of ‘c’mon, c’m on;’ some take the form of, admittedly strange, conversations
between characters within the video, as with the Italianate woman at the table in
the foreground (who to my mind seems to embody the seme ‘insufferable’ with her
overt diction and habit of literally looking down her nose at people); whilst others
directly address the viewer in a ‘perform ance’ mode, expected of the ‘star’ Michael
Stipe, but more unusual when seen from some of the ‘bit’ players. This division of
lyric text makes the idea of locating a stable and unitary authorial ‘voice’ ridiculous,
especially given that there are two Michael Stipes present - as a character and as
a disembodied head on a television screen within the video fram e (a further
problematization of representation?) - and that the compressed time frame of the
image track means people are often talking across one another, the soundtrack
selecting each in turn. The question of whose words these are is left completely
ambiguous; disconnected phrases are divided amongst the party guests, although
all of them speak with Stipe’s voice.
Anyone hoping or expecting to find unity and stability at the level of the
music, however, (and this is not an uncommon move in musicology), will be
somewhat disappointed. It is precisely a musicalization of the image that has
prompted this multiplicity of analytic outcomes. Although the song superficially
resembles the typical strophic verse/chorus/middle eight format of the pop song, a
closer look will show an adaptation of this, and further analysis shows that there is
a confusion of both the identity and the structural function of the verse/chorus
relationship. The basic structure is:

V C V C Int. C C 1 C1 C C

(where V = Verse, C = Chorus, and Int. = Middle Eight, at bars 9, 264, 37, 544, 64,
764, 864, 944, 1024, 1104 respectively - see transcription in the appendix). The
interlude is a middle twelve, rather than a middle eight (in fact it is properly a
middle sixteen, but the chorus re-enters four bars before its completion). It can be
clearly seen that in the second half of the song the structural function of the verse
is replaced by that of a melodically and lyrically altered chorus. W hile verse and
chorus are given distinct tonalities, E minor and its relative major, G, respectively,
both of these are very weakly stated: there is no strong cadence in E minor, and
 50

the only IV V I movement, in G m ajor at the close of the chorus, is immediately

followed by a return to the tonic key, E minor. There is no sense of forward
harmonic drive from verse to chorus and back, and no strong tonal differentiation
between the two. Tonality is used as a structurally enabling force instead of
functionally, as a structurally determining force, insofar as it enables an admittedly
weak and confused distinction between verse and chorus.
This partially explains why the initial impression is that of a straightforward
strophic structure, but if one analyses at the motivic level there is still further
confusion. Each verse can be subdivided into the form A B A A 1 B A 1 (melisma),
where A 1 inverts the opening of A. The motif of a falling third over a G major chord

Figure 2a

t’Tnnjirb ,■

. Am

A1
m £

rhythmically syncopated, that forms the close of both A and A 1, is then used as the
basis of the chorus melody, which closes with a near identical melismatic flourish

Figure 2b

Close of A /A 1

Chorus motif
 51

on the word cry’/ ’try.’ It is this close motivic interconnection, and rhythmic and
rhetorical similarity, allied to an unconventional structure that causes the confusion
between verse and chorus in this piece. The entire song is constructed from a
series of melodic fragments that are permutated in such a way as to generate both
the verse and the chorus: these repeated figures, like the Schumannian body, do
not stay in place.’ Some might see this motivic reworking as a means of
circum venting the structural ambiguity of the song so as to create a greater
consistency and unity, but, very much like the ‘Sphinxes’ of Schum ann’s Carnaval,
this rather wilfully ignores the fact that there are several motives present here,
which although undermining the distinction between verse and chorus are
nevertheless perfectly distinct with respect to one another (to say nothing of the
middle eight). There is not a unity here, but again a multiplicity, a plurality of
fragments, and the totality they produce, such as it is, is fractured but distinct in its
identity. This mode of immanent analysis demonstrates not only the literal,
repetition of motivic fragments, performed in such a way as to highlight their
material qualities, as is often seen in so-called ‘m inim alist’ works, but also
highlights the motility of this repetition en proces, its unfixed and evasive
relationship to the strictures of typical song format.
As can be seen, a brief examination of a few of the more obvious
disjunctions between and within music, word, and image, has generated a
considerable weight of analysis, and left a vast swathe of material untouched:
poetic metre, instrumental timbre, the large number of ‘background’ characters. It
is, of course, in the interaction of all these various parts that the substance of
music video is to be found, and so to conclude this analysis I will perform a brief
com parison between two similar moments with quite different affects. The two
points I refer to are both moments of ‘false’ diegesis, that is, other characters
voicing Stipe’s lyrics: the woman on the rock at the front of the pool, and the
adulterous wom an’ at the back left of the scene respectively. Both sing one of the
two adapted choruses and thus have very similar texts to sing and identical
melodies. However, whereas the form er seems to have a poignancy and quality of
regret, the latter seems far more upbeat. Since both moments have so many
sim ilarities one might think that the stem of this difference might be easy to locate,
but it is not. Does the form er’s wistfulness come from her solitariness, from
something in her face, from the fact that the film is running backwards at this point,
 52

or from the qualities I draw out of the specific word ‘lemonade’ in this context? And
does the latter’s relatively upbeat quality derive from her yellow dress, her joining
with her lover, the fact that the film is now running forwards again, or more
probably from the reintroduction of the full instrumental backing, absent from the
sparse instrumentation of the first statement of the adapted chorus. The answer is
that the distinction resides in all of these facts, and a great many others besides:
for instance, ‘avalanche’ might be linked to the band T h e Avalanches,’ makers of
upbeat dance music, while ‘hurricane’ begets Hurricane no. 1,’ a rather dour rock
band, restricting reference to popular music alone. Some facts are naturally more
relevant than others, and I suspect that the m usic’s timbre is of key importance in
this instance, but none of them are irrelevant, and all contribute, in however small
a way, to the overall sense impression that the music video experience generates.
I em phasize again that this is an interactive, and not an additive process: these
senses are not a mere accumulation of associated properties but an
interconnected web. To remove one element, however small, would be to remove
its interaction with all the other elements and fundamentally alter the 'wiring' of the
object, and it is this point that will be taken up in chapter II. As fragments cohere
to form a totality, so associations cohere to form these fragments. Like the chaotic
fractal image, however deep’ one cares to travel into the structuration of the
object, the same structure will appear time and again, and as Gerald Bruns writes,
after Bakhtin, T h e point to remember is that your descent is not taking you deeper
into the inner world of preconscious grammars or, below these, into the body
where one hears the warm, undifferentiatied murmur of the mother tongue. On the
contrary, you are heading into the outer world of the “social heteroglossia." The
deeper you go, the more open things get.’90

IV

Before laying claim to the fragment as a systematic mode of analytic organization,

it would be wise both to clarify the relationship between fragment and totality, and
to historicize my adoption of the fragmentary aesthetic. Middleton writes:

90 Bruns, G.L., op. cit., pp. 131-2.

 53

There seems to be a certain potency in the post-modernist position, which takes the
dominant system as given and proposes as method of critique the fragment:
subversion takes the form of “guerilla activity" which exploits fissures and forgotten
spaces within the hegemonic structure. An “either/or” (to the extent it existed) is
replaced by an “and/and,” a confrontation between unitary subjectivity and its
destruction by an acceptance of multiples and contradictions.91

Middleton formulates this ‘postm odern’ stance in explicit opposition to the

‘m odernist’ stance of Adorno, and yet Adorno’s later writings not only
acknowledge, but are founded upon the embracing of a fragmentary aesthetic:
'Aesthetic Theory ... is an attempt, from what would now be called a “classical
m odernist” position, to write an aesthetics of modernism which recognizes at the
outset the impossibility of any systematic and unified theory of art today in view of
the fragmentation and pluralism which have characterized the art of the twentieth
century.’92 Fragmentary structure is both modernist and post-modernist. I shall
not attempt to engage the discussion of the relation of modernism to post­
m odernist thought here - those arguments have been well rehearsed elsewhere93
- nor to prove that one or the other of these stances is the correct’ one; (a
fragm entary stance would be to declare both right, although not necessarily in the
same way). What is of use, however, is to assess the fragment/totality relation in
these modes of thought, and also in my own work.
For Adorno, an overarching unity remains the ideal towards which one
might strive, but one must be careful not to confuse this with ‘the “false totality” of
the status quo.'9* Adorno’s aesthetics adopts fragmentation only as an

91 Middleton, R., op. cit., p. 62.

92 Paddison, M., Adorno, Modernism and Mass Culture: Essays on Critical Theory
and Music, (Kahn & Averill, London, 1996), p. 48. See also J.M. Bernstein’s
introduction to Adorno, T.W., The Culture Industry: Selected essays on Mass
Culture, ed. Bernstein, J.M., (Routledge, London and New York, 1991), pp. 7ff.
93 The best known of these being Jameson, F., ‘Postmodernism, or the cultural
logic of late capitalism,’ New Left Review, 146, (1984), pp. 53-92.
94 Paddison, M., op. cit., p. 52.
 54

interm ediary step against ‘mass culture,’ so as to reconstitute the totality in another
form: it is an attempt ‘to evolve structures which can admit chaos, fragmentation
and meaninglessness and which at the same time, through “critical
consciousness,” can transcend such content.’95 This fragment is a means to an
end, whereas the postmodern fragm ent has become an end in itself, a rejoinder to
the ‘grand narratives’ famously critiqued in Lyotard’s Report on Knowledge 96 Both
theories are formulated as a refusal of the status quo, but where Adorno identifies
the existing material relations of the current ‘totality’ as the problem,
postmodernism regards ‘totality’ as such to be the problem. The weakness of this
latter stance, at least in many of its subsequent formulations, is the lack of critical
leverage it enables - the fragm ent cast adrift is easily fetishized and rendered
powerless. Individualized multiplicity bears no danger for late capitalism, and is
more likely to become a new selling opportunity than a threat. W hat is required is
a reconception of the totality as an em ergent property of a set of fragments, an
unfixed and contingent collective entity, that is the resultant of a set of practices,
rather than the determinant of those practices. Such a theory is put forward by
Deleuze and Guattari in the figure of the rhizome, where T h e line no longer forms
a contour, and instead passes between things, between points. ... The multiplicity
it constitutes is no longer subordinated to the O ne.’97 The rhizome is a coherence
of fragments, which no longer need to be reified into ‘types’ for the purposes of
critical discourse; it provides an alternative rather than a challenge to the status
quo, since to challenge it directly would involve acceding to the rules of
engagem ent already set out. In this way the music video can remain musical and
not ideal, material and not transcendent, affect rather than representation.
This problem bears more than a passing similarity to that of locating a final
‘signified,’ that might act as anchor to the system of language, and I do not think
this is mere coincidence. It is essentially a question of ordering and understanding
one’s world, or better Weltanschauung, and this is necessarily connected with the

95 Ibid., p. 52.
96 Lyotard, J.-F., The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans.
Bennington, D. and Massumi, B., (Manchester University Press, Manchester,
1984).
9' Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F., op. cit., p. 505.
 55

issue of language. The binding of world and artefact takes place in and through
language, although this involves an expansion of the concept of 'language' beyond
the narrow one employed by Saussure. Barthes writes: T h e image is penetrated
through and through by the system of meaning, in exactly the same way as man is
articulated to the very depths of his being in distinct languages. The language of
the image is not necessarily the totality of utterances emitted ... it is also the
totality of utterances received.’98 This is not to say, however, that the image (or
music video) derives its identity from the totality of meanings centred upon it alone,
but from the very system of meaning as well, from a ‘language’ enlarged by
reception theory, the language of Heidegger, Benjamin, and Wittgenstein.
W ittgenstein in particular maps out a relation between identity and language that is
of great significance to the fragment/totality model. The idea of language as a
‘totality of utterances,’ not as a single entity, but as a connected group of things
(which he termed ‘language-gam es’), is of fundamental im portance to the later
W ittgenstein’s thought: ‘We see that what we call ‘sentence’ and ‘language’ has
not the formal unity that I imagined, but is the family of structures more or less
related to one another.’99 The connection between these things is the same as
that between different games; there is not one rule that applies to all, a unifying
law, but a range of disparate entities that are similar in some respects, different in
others, but which all overlap to a greater or lesser extent to produce the field (or
family) of ‘gam es.’

Instead of producing something common to all that we call language, I am saying that
these phenomena have no one thing in common which makes us use the same word
for all, - but that they are related to one another in many different ways. And it is
because of this relationship, or these relationships, that we call them all “language.” ...
We see a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing:
sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail.100

98 Barthes, R., ‘Rhetoric of the Image,’ op. cit., p. 47.

99 W ittgenstein, L., Philosophical Investigations, §108.
100 Ibid., §§65-6.
 56

This familial relationship that characterizes language, and thus an entire culture or
‘form of life’ for Wittgenstein, a model of multiple connections which exist as a
coherence without there being any centralized unity, is precisely the kind of
relationship that exists between fragments and totality, and determines the format
and identity of any given artefact. Thus a clarification of identity and fragmentary
structure is as much an interrogation of the sign system itself as of its specific
instances.
A final coherence,’ then, is not an appeal to a singular and unified entity,
but the above does not solve the problem of its location. Barthes notes:
‘theoretically, we can never halt a sign at a final signified; the only halt we can give
a sign in its reading is a halt which comes from practice, but not from the
sem iological system itself.’101 The solution to the problem lies not in a theorization
of Weltanschauung, but in W eltanschauung itself, that is, a way of living. The
‘final’ signified, ultimate coherence, lies not in theory, but in praxis. Quoting
W ittgenstein once more: ‘Do not say: T h e re isn’t a last’ definition.' That is just as
if you choose to say T he re isn’t a last house in this road; one can always build an
additional one.” 102 Thus the ultimate arbiter is one’s own culture and language, a
form of life,’ and the ultimate coherence the community in which it is received; a
coherence in which each individual is a fragment at once constitutive of and
constituted by that community. It is worth bearing in mind, then, that the source of
this understanding is itself contingent and in no way absolute. Thus the idea of
‘sym bolic dynamism,’ the continual dialectical process in which all parts of the
system are caught up, such that yesterday’s innovation becomes today’s cliche, is
not a strain upon a transcendental absolute, but constitutive of the system itself.
This close association of model and world is not entirely benign, however,
particularly with regard to music. There is a danger that music video might
become another means by which the model of the status quo might reassert itself.
Music, as Deleuze and Guattari warn, is a powerful tool of connection/collection:
‘Since its force of deterritorialization is the strongest, it also effects the most

101 Barthes, R., 'Semiology and M edicine,’ in The Semlotic Challenge, trans.
Howard, R., (University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1991), p.
210 .
102 W ittgenstein, L., Philosophical Investigations, §29.
 57

massive of reterritorializations.’103 Music video may facilitate an alternative to the

order of representation and enable a new ‘form of life,’ but it does not force one to
follow that line of escape; it must be actively taken up. One might equally generate
a 'rhetoric' of the music video (after Barthes’ ‘Rhetoric of the Image’), shot through
with dom inant ideology (in what circumstances are ideologies anything other than
dominant?): ‘The variation in readings is not, however, anarchic; it depends on the
different kinds of knowledge - practical, national, cultural, aesthetic - invested in
the image and these can be classified.’104 Although in one sense Barthes is
correct to identify that the fragment/totality model is utterly bound up with
hegem onic practice, its divergent, multiple nature makes complete codification a
near impossibility, and always allows a degree of unpoliced space. Fragmentary
structure is not entirely without a capacity for resistance, and its insidious nature is
a potential strength as well as a weakness.
Having established that the music video artefact is neither a straightforward
articulation of late-capitalism, nor is it an obvious site of resistance, one would do
well to acknowledge that this condition of flexibility is characteristic of capital itself.
As Tetzlaff notes: ‘It [capital] does not present, nor has it ever presented, anything
like a single, unified dominant ideology.’105 Thus the field of interaction between
them is very much more complicated than is often made out. Tetzlaff continues:

The pop culture text is theorized as attempting to resolve contradictions in line with the
prevailing ideology, but subcultural audiences create their own meanings, which are
necessarily resistive since they contradict the dominant discourse. ... However, this is
not necessarily a sign of progressive politics. ... The question is, does this indicate
successful local resistances or only fragmentation of capital s address to its subjects, a
series of carefully articulated “job descriptions’’?106

103 Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F., op. cit., p. 348.

104 Barthes, R., T h e Rhetoric of the Image,’ op. cit., p. 47.
105 Tetzlaff, D., ‘Popular Culture and Social Control in late capitalism ,’ in Culture
and Power, ed. Scannell, P., Schlesinger, P., and Sparks, C., (Sage, London,
1992), p. 62.
106 Ibid., p. 59.
 58

I am not sure, however, that I agree with T etzlaffs rather downbeat conclusion,
that in the face of late capital, as with the Daleks, resistance is futile. A resistance
to the totalizing impulse, the desire to generate fragments that cohere without
having an essential unity, like the language-games of Wittgenstein, is more than
just good post-structural practice; it is a co-optation of the techniques of capital
itself. To set up a totalized and logical system is to invite its destruction -
removing any one aspect means the collapse of the entirety - better to spread
oneself, like capital, in such a manner that there is not one target, but many, and
so the destruction of one element need not destroy the resistive power of the
artefact as a whole. And the music video artefact, as a gateway to fragmentary
aesthetics, is capable of sustaining other forms of resistance. The semic
proliferation generated by music video as described above, is in a reciprocal
relationship with the fragment, which is to say that it is both constitutive of and
amplified by, the fragment model, and can enable a form of resistance of its own,
identified by Baudrillard. T h e present argument of the system is to maximize
speech, to maximize the production of meaning, of participation. And so the
strategic resistance is that of the refusal of meaning and the refusal of speech.’107
In a system dedicated to use, to the effective transfer of information, and above all
to efficiency, the prolific generation of that without use, an excess without logic, a
kind of ‘sem ic noise,’ is a reminder of an alternative, of another way, not so very
different from the Bakhtinian carnival. Furthermore, this intense polysemy may
have the potential to rupture the sign system itself, to be the ‘specific object' of
‘sem analysis’ described by Kristeva in her essay T h e Semiotic Activity.’108
Eagleton writes: T h e representational devices of bourgeois society are those of
exchange-value; but it is precisely this signifying frame that the productive forces
must break beyond, releasing a heterogeneity of use-values whose unique

10' Baudrillard, J., T h e Masses: The Implosion of the Social in the M edia,’ in Jean
Baudrillard: Selected Writings, ed. Poster, M., (Polity, Cambridge, 1988), p. 219.
108 Kristeva, J., T h e Semiotic Activity,’ Screen, vol. 14, (1973), p. 38. Kristeva
suggests that the ‘poetic text’ will fulfil this role, but I believe the music video to be
an even better example of ‘a bearer of a surplus of signification that the system of
the sign is unable to contain.’ [ibid.]
 59

particularity would seem to refuse all standardized representation.’109 It is this

com bination of properties, the stretching to breaking point of the signifying frame,
the uniqueness of each and every video coherence, of which every instance is a
kind of very particular cultural map, and its problematizing of the standard idea of
representation, that make the music video artefact a potent source of analytic
activity.

Apart from its political potential, the fragment model, particularly as it is

realized in music video, has methodological ramifications that extend beyond the
direct realm of the artefact into one's engagement with the world. The idea that if
one attempts to probe the ‘depth’ of the artefact one encounters only more
fragments, combined with the absence of a fixed unity, renders the concept of
'essence,' a key object for analysis, largely redundant. As Eagleton notes of
Nietzsche's thought: ‘Art instructs in the profound truth of how to live superficially,
to halt at the sensuousness of the surface rather than hunt the illusory essence
beneath it. Perhaps superficiality is the true essence of life, and depth a mere veil
thrown over the authentic banality of things.’110 The privileged term ‘depth,’ as a
corollary to essence,’ ‘explanation,’ and more often than not, ‘origin,’ is turned on
its head. ‘Essence,’ such as it is, is present not in the vertical but in the horizontal
axis of the object, in a Deleuzian plane. The same form is generated by the
specific nature of a particular coherence at all levels; there is no one thing to trace
it back to; one simply moves further and further out into Bakhtinian 'social
heteroglossia.’ Instead, ‘since everything lies open to view there is nothing to
explain.’111 Rather, as shown previously, the purpose of analysis is to clarify, and
not to explain,112 This also implies a far greater role for the materiality of the
artefact, its specific qualities and affective impact, to which I now turn.

109 Eagleton, T., op. cit., p. 214.

110 Ibid., p. 258.
111 W ittgenstein, L., Philosophical Investigations, §126.
112 A detailed discussion of this distinction can be found in Cioffi, F., Wittgenstein
on Freud and Frazer, (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1998).
 Chora

August 1862, Vienna

My good mood made it easier for me on that evening to treat Hanslick for some time as
a casual acquaintance up to the point when he took me aside for an intimate talk and
assured me, with tears and sobs, that he could no longer bear it to see himself
misunderstood by me; the blame for anything untoward in his judgements about me,
he averred, was certainly not rooted in a malevolent intention but solely in a limitation
of the individual, and he would like nothing better than to have the boundaries of his
knowledge extended by my instruction. These declarations were made with such an
explosion of emotion that I could feel no wish other than to soothe his pain and
promised my undivided sympathy in his further pursuits.1

This moment of rapprochement between the two primary figures of nineteenth-

century musical aesthetics, made on W agner’s part with the expressly political aim
of garnering a favourable climate for production of his operas in Vienna, was to be
remarkably short-lived. Only three months later W agner invited Hanslick to a
reading of the text of Die Meistersingers von Nurnberg with the sole aim of
humiliating him through the unveiling of the character Beckmesser, an idiotic and
unmusical pedant, and an obvious caricature of Hanslick (to the extent that
W agner had actually named the character Hans Lick in an earlier draft). To his
eternal credit Hanslick left the gathering without a word, but from this point on

1 W a g n e r, R., My Life, trans. Gray, A., ed. W hittall, M., (C a m brid g e U niversity Press, 1983),

pp. 694-5.
 61

hostilities between the two were resumed in earnest, and would remain
unresolved. Through a hardening of their respective positions into mutually
incom patible views of music and opera, a state that was considerably enhanced by
the willingness of their followers to either misrepresent or m isunderstand both of
their positions for polemical value, a remarkable opportunity to reform ulate the
aesthetics of music based upon the common ground of their theories seems to
have been missed.
That W agner’s aesthetics might be misunderstood is perhaps
understandable; his theoretical promiscuity and capacity for adopting entirely
contradictory stances under the rubric of a self-mythology of consistency has been
well docum ented2 and formed the basis of a vicious attack by his form er acolyte,
N ietzsche3 (and in part explains the disparate groups that labelled themselves as
‘W agnerian’ in the years following his death). W hilst W agner’s capacity for being
all things to all men has done little to alter his impact or popularity (at least outside
of Israel, where he remains taboo), the misappropriation of Hanslick as a ‘form alist’
has resulted in a persistent misreading of his theories; a situation not helped by
Gustav C ohen’s translation into English of Vom M usikalisch-Schonen that, in the
words of its recent re-translator Geoffrey Payzant ‘rarely makes contact with
Hanslick’s argument.'4 John Shepherd dismisses Hanslick as an ‘absolutist,’5
Jean-Jacques Nattiez as 'adopting a normatively form alist conception of music ...
deny[ing] that purely sonorous configurations, independent of any textual

2 See, for instance, Wagnerism in European Culture and Politics, ed Large, D., and
Weber, W , (Cornell University Press, New York, 1984), and Dahlhaus, C., The Twofold
Truth in Wagner’s Aesthetics,’ in Between Romanticism and Modernism, trans. Whittall, M.,
(University of California Press, Berkeley, 1980).
3 See both ‘Nietzsche contra Wagner,’ Collected Works, vol. Ill, trans. Common, T., (T.
Fisher Unwin, London, 1899), and The Case of Wagner,’ in The Birth of Tragedy and The
Case of Wagner, trans. Kaufmann, W., (Random House, Toronto, 1967).
4 The details of this are discussed in Payzant’s ‘Essay: Towards a Revised reading of
Hanslick,’ in Hanslick, E., On the Musically Beautiful, trans. Payzant, G., (Hackett
Publishing Company, Indianapolis, 1986).
5 Shepherd, J., 'Music Consumption and cultural self-identities: some theoretical and
methodological reflections,’ Media, Culture and Society, vol. 8, (1986), p. 310.
 62

suggestion, do indeed have a power of evocation.’6 Even in 1998 Christopher

Small could repeat the mantra that ‘form alism ’ has ‘no content whatever beyond
the contem plation of the beauty of the tonal patterns and form s,’ and that ‘this view
even denies any value whatsoever to the sensuous enjoyment of musical sound.
The nineteenth-century Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick was a leading exponent of
such a view .’7 What I hope to demonstrate here is not only that Hanslick's
conception of aesthetics is more subtle than he is typically given credit for, but also
that, alongside Wagner, it allows for a connection to the much more radical
theories of Roland Barthes or Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and can facilitate
a better understanding of the processes of music video.
The key point upon which Hanslick and W agner are said to differ, and the
most relevant to music video, is in their conception of how the arts might be related
to one another, most notably in that celebrated W agnerian concept, the
Gesamtkunstwerk, a putative synthesis of all the arts rather than a straightforward
com posite art form. Amongst his many legitimate criticisms of Wagner, Hanslick
rather unfairly suggests that W agner’s attempt to perform this synthesis rests upon
his adherence to ‘feeling-theory,’ that is, that the function of art is either to arouse
or else directly embody ‘feelings’ or em otions.8 Since Vom M usikalisch-Schdnen
was form ulated specifically as a response to the idea that music represents
feelings, it is to be expected that his dislike of W agner’s music and aesthetics
would lead him to suggest that W agner subscribed to this viewpoint (and to be fair,
W agner’s sometimes confused writings do little to dissuade one from this), and
thus presumably that the Gesamtkunstwerk operated by evoking the same ‘feeling’
in all art form s simultaneously.9 W agner’s theory was actually more subtle than
this (although would still be equally mistaken in Hanslick’s view) and derives from
a strain of thought that runs throughout Romanticism, expressed in Robert

6 Nattiez, J.-J., ‘Can One Speak of Narrativity in Music,’ Journal of the Royal Musical
Association, vol. 115:2, (1990), p. 243.
7 Small, C , Musicking: The meanings of performing and listening, (Wesleyan University
Press, New Hampshire, 1998), p. 135.
8 For a discussion of the complexities of ‘feeling-theory,’ see Dahlhaus, C., Esthetics of
Music, trans. Austin, W., (Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 16-24
9 Hanslick selectively quotes from Wagner’s The Artwork of the Future in the section of On
the Musically Beautiful entitled ‘Some Feeling-Theorists,’ p. 91.
 63

S chum ann’s aphorism that T h e aesthetics of one art is that of the others; only the
material is different.’10 In this view, taken (like so much of Schum ann’s theory)
from the aesthetics of Jean Paul (who in turn looked back to G oethe11) the defining
quality of art was not the concrete ‘feeling,’ but instead the abstract idea of ‘poetry,’
falling in line with the German Idealism of the time. In the hands of W agner the
difficult ‘poetry’ became the even more problematical ‘dram a,’ and it is at this point
that the question of how to combine differing art forms becomes embroiled in the
long running dispute over the primacy of music and word; a dispute that has
existed as long as one has been set to the other. Perhaps surprisingly, neither
W agner nor Hanslick strike a definite pose on one side of this issue: the question
is alm ost entirely incidental to the core of Hanslick's arguments (although he of
course engages with them), and is uncomfortably straddled by Wagner, as
Nietzsche pointedly exposed in his fragm ent ‘On Music and W ords,’12 but it is
worth a brief diversion to understand both the intellectual climate in which both
writers worked, and the (mis)use to which their ideas were put subsequently.
From ancient times and throughout the history of early sacred music the
primacy of the word (or, indeed, the biblical ‘W ord’) was, so to speak, taken as
read. W ith the growing complexity of W estern polyphony during the Renaissance,
however, the idea that one must be sacrificed for the glorification of the other
became more contentious, not least because of the clash between the
Reform ation’s avowed desire to strip away ornament from religion, and the
Catholic church’s awareness of the allure of musical performance to its

10 Quoted in Dahlhaus, C., Esthetics of Music, p. 3.

11 In fact, Goethe’s theories seem to be incompatible with the idea of the
Gesamtkunstwerk, but are nevertheless an apparent inspiration of it.

Colour and sound do not admit of being compared in any way, but both are referable to
a higher formula: both are derivable, though each for itself, from a higher law. They
are like two rivers that have their source in one and the same mountain, but
subsequently pursue their way, under totally different conditions, in two totally different
regions, so that throughout the course of both no two points can be compared.

From Zu Fahbenlehre, quoted in Cook, N , Analysing Musical Multimedia, p. 46.

12 Nietzsche, F., 'On Music and Words’, trans. Kaufmann, W., in Dahlhaus, C., Between
Romanticism and Modernism, pp. 103ff.
 64

congregation. The Council of Trent decrees in the m id-sixteenth century

attempted to resolve this split by upholding the so-called ‘Roman style’ of
Palestrina as a model of good practice, but could do nothing to change the
underlying tension between the desire either to foreground the text or to give the
music free rein. Thereafter the question of their ‘correct’ relation would recur
sporadically, following what Carl Dahlhaus term s one of the oldest
historiographical schemes, that of the origin, decline, and restoration of an idea.’13
The first notable eruption of controversy surrounded the debate between
Monteverdi and his critic Artusi regarding the seconda prattica: typical of the
debate was the fact that Monteverdi restricted himself to composing, and had little
to do with the theoretical nuts and bolts of the affair, leaving it to his brother
Giovanni and Vincenzo Galilei to defend this ‘new’ music. More typical still was
the variety of forms this doctrine of adherence to the text took; the intensely
chrom atic and polyphonic word painting of Gesualdo was as distant from the prima
prattica as it was the seconda prattica, but was it a more or less faithful rendition of
a given poem than the even cadenced monody of Sigismondo d'lndia? The
answer depended upon whether one understood musical accompaniment of a text
to mean illustration of individual words, of the overall ‘poetic intention’ of an entire
clause, or else simply heightening the declamation, allowing the words to ‘speak
for them selves,’ after an almost entirely imagined ancient Greek model, since there
was at the time no extant ancient Greek music available. The question re-
em erged in the eighteenth century, first with the debate between Rameau and
Rousseau concerning the relative importance of harmony and melody known as
the ‘Querelle des Bouffons,' and shortly after was reignited by G luck’s operatic
‘reforms, which again cited a ‘decline’ into ornamentation and the need to revive
the m odel of ‘the ancients.’ (It was Franz G rillparzer’s response to this program of
reform that seems to have inspired Hanslick’s attack on both Gluck and Wagner,
given the extensive quotation of Grillparzer present in Vom Musikalisch-
Schonen u ) By the nineteenth century this idea was beginning to be turned on its
head, for although the idea that music and text should accurately reflect one
another was retained, based on Rousseau’s (amongst others’) suggestion that

13 Dahlhaus, C., Esthetics of Music, p. 65.

14 Hanslick, E., op. cit., pp. 23-4 in particular.
 65

music and speech had a common origin, music was now believed to be the site of
a transcendent meaning, in comparison with which words were an inferior and
incapable means of communication. This viewpoint, which has come to be
associated with the term ‘absolute m usic’ (first coined by W agner as a negative
term) form s what Dahlhaus describes as ‘the latent unity of musical aesthetics in
the nineteenth century,’15 but it continued to exist uneasily alongside an
acknowledgem ent of the importance of words to music. Music continued to be
thought of as a fundam entally vocal art, and as Nicholas Cook has noted, it is
precisely at the historical juncture where ‘absolute m usic’ emerged that there was
an explosion of words in the form of programme notes and musical analysis, as
though they were suppressed in one place only to re-emerge elsewhere.16 It is
exactly this uneasy balance that W agner attempts to strike, caught between
ancient tragedy and Schopenhauer, yet in a more profound way, and this is
som ething that Dahlhaus appears to miss, both W agner and Hanslick, in different
ways, sidestep this bugbear of music aesthetics entirely.
Regardless of what their followers might claim, or indeed what they claim of
each other, neither Hanslick nor W agner appear to be interested in establishing
the prim acy of either music or word. W agner cuts the Gordian knot by
subordinating both music and word to the properly abstract ‘dram a,’ whilst
Hanslick’s argument is based precisely on the non-commensurability of differing
art forms, at least in the terms put forward above in the Schumann quotation.17 As
Cook has suggested, the long running word/music debate has served to conceal a
far more fundamental consistency - of a model of ‘unitary conform ance’ which
begins by identifying one medium as the origin of meaning, and uses this as the

15 Dahlhaus, C., Between Romanticism and Modernism, p. 39. See also the same author’s
The Idea of Absolute Music, trans. Lustig, R., (University of Chicago Press, 1989).
16 Cook, N., The Domestic Gesamtkunstwerk, or Record sleeves and Reception,' in
Composition-Performance-Reception, pp. 105-117.
17 It must be acknowledged here that where poetry and music are joined, Hanslick states
that musical specificity predominates (The union of poetry with music and opera is a
morganatic marriage.’ On the Musically Beautiful, p. 26), insofar as he believes that bad
music can spoil a good poem in a way that the reverse can not. This seems to be a
personal prejudice, however, rather than a necessary outcome of his theoretical
framework, and is partially retracted in his comparison of music and colour.
 66

m easure of other media through a series of pair-wise judgem ents of sim ilarity or
dissim ilarity.’18 Against this analysis, W agner’s model displaces all media involved
by measuring them not against each other, but against ‘dram a,’ in effect
designating all media equivalent (and thus allowing himself to appear to favour one
medium or the other at any given time without disrupting his overall aesthetic).
Hanslick deems questions regarding the relating of differing arts to be irrelevant to
their aesthetic appreciation, although not, as we shall see, to be entirely
impossible.
As mentioned above, the Schumannian concept of ‘poetry,’ the site of
Schopenhauer's ‘aesthetic pleasure’ and driving force of nineteenth-century
aesthetics (essentially derived from the Platonic Idea), is distorted by W agner’s
reading of Gluck into the concept of ‘dram a’ in the abstract, and this distortion is
not without consequences. W agner does not encounter Schopenhauer until
1854,19 and for all his attempts to reorder his earlier theories in the light of this, his
com m itm ent to Idealism remains short of being absolute, with the result that later
self-styled ‘W agnerians’ and the history of the Gesamtkunstwerk would take subtly
divergent paths. W hat is certain is that ‘dram a’ functions in a transcendent
capacity: Nietzsche makes this much clear in stating ‘It was not with his music that
W agner conquered them, it was with the “idea.”’20 If one reads on, however, it
seems that Nietzsche’s main criticism is that this transcendent idea is not ideal
enough:

It is the enigmatic character of his art, its playing hide and seek behind a hundred
symbols, its polychromy of the idea that leads and lures these youths to Wagner. ... In
the midst of Wagner’s multiplicity, abundance and arbitrariness they feel as if justified
in their own eyes - “redeemed." Trembling they hear how great symbols approach
from foggy distances to resound in his art with muted thunder.21

18 Cook, N., Analysing Musical Multimedia, p. 115.

19 Dahlhaus, C., ‘The Twofold truth in Wagner’s Aesthetics,’ op. cit., p. 33.
20 Nietzsche, F., ‘The Case of Wagner,’ §10, op. cit., p. 178.
21 Ibid., p. 178.
 67

In Nietzsche's view, W agner should have given primacy to the musical idea
instead of tailoring the music to ‘theatrical’ symbols, and thus barring access to the
essential sanctuary of m usic.’22 To attempt to comprehend music through its
sym bolic representation is to miss the aesthetic ‘truth’ contained therein.
Perhaps, then, the answer would be to strike the category of ‘dram a’ and
even ‘poetry’ from the equation, and look directly to the sensuous possibilities
represented by the arts. Rather curiously Nietzsche is strangely quiet on the
sensuous qualities of music, so caught up is he in the musical ‘idea,’ but
paradoxically this is precisely what the symbolist movement sought to take from
Wagner. Gerald Turbow writes: Baudelaire found a similarity between W agner’s
attempt to create a synthesis of the arts and his own idea, stated in his poem
“Correspondances,” that our senses respond to forms in nature’s language that are
sym bols o f truths inherent in the world of the spirit.’23 Stripping the W agnerian
Gesam tkunstwerk of the unifying ideal of ‘dram a’ enabled the symbolist poets to
concentrate on the individual constituents and their sensuous possibilities, but this
was fatally compromised by their continued commitment to the unity of the ideal,
‘truths inherent in the world of the spirit,’ which resulted in these sensuous
possibilities being received not in their material particularity, but as ‘forms in
nature’s language.’ The irony of symbolism is that by responding directly to a
material ideal rather than dram a’ or ‘poetry,’ the symbolists lost the ability to
consider each art independently of the other: W agner’s synthesis of the arts
became synaesthesia. Nowhere is this clearer than in the Mysterium of Scriabin.
Scriabin, the ultimate sensualist, considered W agner ‘too theatrical’, and went to
extraordinary lengths to abolish the stage/theatre distinction by combining his
music with coloured lighting, dancing, sacred texts and even incense in pursuit of

22 Nietzsche, F., Those who carry away feelings as the effects of music possess in them,
as it were, a symbolic intermediate realm that can give them a foretaste of music while at
the same time it excludes them from its inmost sanctuaries,’ from 'On Music and Words,'
op. cit., p 112. It is worth noting that Nietzsche is capable of just as much contrariness as
Wagner with regard to aesthetics. Elsewhere he writes ‘there is an aesthetic of
decadence, and there is a classical aesthetics - the “beautiful in music” is a figment of the
imagination, like all of idealism,’ in ‘The Case of Wagner,’ Epilogue, op, cit., p. 190.
23 Turbow, G., ‘Wagnerism in France,’ in Wagnerism in European Culture and Politics, op.
cit., p. 162.
 68

an 'all-unity' experience. In practice, however, the ‘absolute’ character of musical

‘fo rm ’ (not the form of traditional music analysis) acted as a spur to generate
identical ‘form s’ in other media, to produce an absolute idea that was absolutely
m eaningful, which for Scriabin equated to God. In the cult of Scriabin one might
educe ‘the potential fascism of m usic’24 identified by Deleuze and Guattari. The
synaesthetic model is incapable of treating sound simply as sound; it is always a
representation, a cipher of something else.
A more practical problem with the ideal unity of a synaesthetic event is the
fact that it is impossible to sustain in a composite art form; however much one may
try to duplicate exactly the experience of one art in the experience of another, the
project is doomed to failure. As Sergei Eisenstein pointed out in The Film Sense,
synaesthetic associations and cultural associations are both difficult to dissociate
and utterly pervasive: is the quality of sunshine immanent to the colour yellow, and
if so will this be experienced similarly by the Inuit of the Arctic tundra and the
Bedouin o f the Arabian desert? If two genuine synaesthetes cannot agree on any
fixed connection between words and colours (the most common form of
synaesthesia, although by no means the only one), what chance is there of
persuading anyone that two distinct phenomena can provoke a singular, absolute
response? In any art form composed of differing stimuli, a one to one mapping is
impossible.

Cook notes of Schoenberg’s attempt at a Gesamtkunstwerk that ‘The music

in Die gluckliche Fland does not exhaust the signification of the colours, any more
than the colours exhaust the signification of the sound; no m echanical translation
from one to the other is possible.’25 Schoenberg, unlike the symbolists, however,
had foreseen this, and his aim was not to forge a union, but a harmony: T h e whole
thing should have the effect (not of a dream) but of chords. Of music. It must
never suggest symbols, or meaning, or thoughts, but simply the play of colour and
form .’26 Like Wagner, Schoenberg had acknowledged that an artistic synthesis

24 D eleuze, G., and G uattari, F., A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, p.

348.
25 C ook, N., Analysing Musical Multimedia, pp. 55-6.
26 Q u o te d in Butler, C., Early Modernism: Literature, Music and Painting in Europe 1900-

1916, (C la re nd on Press, O xford, 1994), p. 87.

 69

need not be synaesthetic, but a desire for some kind of all encompassing discrete
and unitary identity equivalent to W agner’s ‘dram a’ still hangs over his abstracted
‘form s,’ and this quickly causes problems. He continues ‘Just as music never
drags a meaning around with it, at least not in the form in which it [music]
m anifests itself, even though meaning is inherent in its nature, so too this should
simply be like sounds for the eye, and so far as I am concerned everyone is free to
think or feel something similar to what he thinks or feels while writing m usic.’2'
This final effort to offload the issue onto the site of reception fails to conceal that
Schoenberg is struggling to maintain the idea that ‘form s’ do not have meaning, so
as to allow them to act in counterpoint to one another, but his concern for unity
makes this impossible to sustain, as is clear from Cook’s reading: ‘both media,
together and in conjunction with the other elements of Schoenberg’s
Gesamtkunstwerk, converge upon a cumulative meaning which is emotional and,
in the broadest sense, dram atic.’28 A concern for the unitary identity of the work’
forces Schoenberg to conceive of the play of forms entirely in the abstract; in
suppressing the material qualities of the disparate media that make up Die
gluckliche Hand Schoenberg effectively idealizes the concept of form in the same
way as the symbolists, hence his difficulty in preventing a reterritorialization of this
upon meaning and drama.
Herein lies the greatest challenge to a unified Gesamtkunstwerk. However
much one attempts to idealize or abstract the content that makes up the work, so
as to demonstrate either its essential similarity or compatibility, a stubborn
materiality, an affective power remains, that evades any question of ‘dram a’ or of
‘m eaning.’ Cook criticizes Eisenstein’s and Hanns Eisler’s theories regarding
com posite art for being wedded to the concept of identity, and hence replicating
some of the sym bolist’s arguments, when they are attempting to form ulate a theory
opposed to the model of synaesthesia.

Like Eisenstein - like Kandinsky - Eisler has only one fundamental model for the
relationship between different media, and it is identity. ... Both Eisenstein and Eisler
assert the principle of counterpoint, but fail to theorize it; they reject the principle of

27 Ibid., p. 87.

28 C ook, N., Analysing Musical Multimedia, p. 56.

 70

synaesthesia, but cannot escape its language. Both Eisenstein and Eisler, in short,
end up going round in circles because they are trying to use a language predicated on
29
similarity to articulate a principle predicated on difference.

Cook's jettisoning of the concept of identity, and hence of the role played by
specific material qualities in themselves has some profound consequences,
however. He has constantly to have recourse to explanation in terms of ‘m eaning’
and ‘dram a.’ A specific timbre, a vowel sound, a striking colour, all can only be
com prehended by Cook insofar as they have meaning, that is, by discussing not
what they are but what they stand for. This is remarkably similar to one of Theodor
A dorno’s criticisms of W agner’s musical technique:

What specifically characterizes Wagnerian expression is its intentionality: the motiv is a

sign that transmits a particle of congealed meaning. For all its intensity and emphasis,
Wagner's music is as script is to words and it is hard to avoid the suspicion that its
intensity is needed only to conceal that fact. Its expression does not present itself, but
is itself the object of presentation. Wagner’s leitmotivs stand revealed as allegories
that come into being when something purely external, something that has fallen out of
the framework of a spiritual totality, is appropriated by meanings and made to
represent them.30

Thus one always elides the object, apprehends it by proxy; one must never
engage with it, only understand it passively.
How, then, might one begin to reconcile the material identity of differing art
forms in order to produce a composite such as a music video that coheres in any
kind of perceptible way? One can almost instinctively (that is, one perceives it to
be instinctive, although it is not necessarily a-cultural) discern that some
combinations of sound and vision are more apt than others, sometimes as a
correspondence, sometimes as a fruitful counterposition, but how does one make

29 Ibid.. p. 65.
30 Adorno, T., In Search of Wagner, trans. Livingstone, R., (Verso, London and New York,
1991), p 45.
 71

such a judgement? What is required is a method of identifying the individual arts

in such a way as to acknowledge their specificity, whilst allowing of some kind of
comparison to be made between them, a com prehensible mechanism of relation.
And this is what Eduard Hanslick furnishes us with in his deceptively simple (and
often mistranslated) statement that D er Inhalt der Musik sind tonend bewegte
F orm eri (T h e content of music is tonally moving form s’).31 Much of the power of
this idea, that content is itself a kind of form, was neither a new idea nor restricted
at this tim e to Hanslick. Many of the W agnerian followers discussed above were
suggesting similar things: Baudelaire’s ‘form s’ were ‘symbols of truths,’ and
Schoenberg made ‘the play of form ’ the object of his Gesamtkunstwerk.
Eisenstein’s ‘inner movement’ seems especially close to 'tonally moving forms,' but
it seems closer still to Johann Gottfried von Herder’s ‘energy of m ovem ent'32
described in his Kalligone of 1800, which was in its turn inspired by Wilhelm von
Humboldt's and Rousseau's ideas on speech, and so on back to Aristotle’s
concept of ‘energia.’ The importance of Hanslick’s thought, however, is in his
derivation of this form directly from the affective materiality of the art, bypassing
com pletely the realm of the ideal.

If people do not acknowledge the abundance of beauty residing in the purely musical,
one may blame the undervaluation of the sensuous, which we find in the older systems
of aesthetics favouring morality and aesthetic sensitivity and in Hegel’s system
favouring the “Idea." Every art originates from and is active within the sensuous. The
feeling theory fails to recognize this; it ignores hearing entirely and goes directly to
feeling. Music creates for the heart, they say; the ear is of no consequence. ... The
auditory imagination, however, which is something entirely different from the sense of
hearing regarded as a mere funnel open to the surface of appearances, enjoys in

31 Hanslick, E., On the Musically Beautiful, p. 29. For a discussion of this phrase and the
history of its translation see Payzant’s ‘Essay’ in the same volume, op. cit., pp. 94ff. It
should be noted that Payzant’s translation is itself not unproblematic, the translation of
tOnend as 'tonally' imputing a specific musical sense that is not necessarily present in the
German original.
32
See Monelle, R., Linguistics and Semiotics in Music, p. 212.
 72

conscious sensuousness the sounding shapes, the self-constructing tones, and dwells
in free and immediate conception of them.33

Thus ‘fo rm ’ is at once an expression of musical content and also of the conditions
of its own being, which is to say the nature of ‘tone;’ the actualization and potential
of musical sound in one. Remarkably, if one looks closely one can find an
acceptance of the possibility of this thesis (if not an actual endorsement) in
W agner’s own writings, even if it is described in derogatory terms, as in this
passage from The Artwork o f the Future (1850): T h e human voice had at length
com pletely taken refuge in a merely sensual and fluid tone device by means of
which alone the art of music, wholly withdrawn from poetry, continued to present
itself.’34 One sees here for a brief moment W agner’s acceptance of the idea of
m usic in and for itself, without recourse to the category of the ideal, be that dram a’
or the fully transcendent ideal of ‘absolute m usic.’ Being Wagner, however, he
regards this as being insufficient, and sets about ‘redeeming’ this state of affairs by
uniting music with the other arts, stating that Through the art of tone, the arts of
poetry and dancing understand each other.’35 The ideal site of unity that W agner
alights upon in this essay is a rather less ideal one than is seen in many of his
other writings, though; namely the motion of the human body: T h is symphony
[Beethoven's Seventh] is ... the most blissful act of bodily movement, ideally
embodied, as it were, in tone.’36 Thus W agner both acknowledges the possibility
of a non-ideal autonomous music (even if he does not like it), and suggests the
possibility of a synthesis based upon an equally non-ideal footing (which he then
rejects in favour of the ‘universal dram a’ of Beethoven’s Ninth). There is without
doubt a considerable gap between W agner’s and Hanslick’s conceptions of music,
and how music relates to the other arts, but it is not an unbridgeable one. Both
dem onstrate that the model of ‘unitary conformance’ described by Cook (see

33
Hanslick, E., op. cit., pp. 29-30.
34 Wagner, R., The Artwork of the Future, extract in Strunk’s Source Readings in Music
History, Revised Edition, vol. 6: The Nineteenth Century, ed. Solie, R., (W.W. Norton and
Co., London and New York, 1998), p 63.
35 Ibid., p. 58.
36 Ibid., p. 64.
 73

above), giving primary and subordinate roles to differing media, can be subverted,
and I hope to have shown that their ideas regarding the combining of the arts are
not so implacably opposed as is usually thought. For although Hanslick is largely
silent on the topic of joining art forms, his concentration upon the ‘specifically
m usical’ need not impede the possibility of an appreciation of a composite art
work, only the idea that such a thing would have an overall ‘unity.’ In the little
com m ent he does make, Hanslick himself implies that his theory of 'content
consisting of materially moving form s’ (to paraphrase) could be extended to other
media. Indeed, when he states that ‘the formal aspects of both music and colour
rest on the same basis,’ he appears to positively encourage the same process to
be undertaken in the other arts, that is, that the visual be judged on the way in
which it works out and manipulates the qualities of images, poetry the qualities of
language, and so on. The task of the analyst of the composite art work, then, is
not sim ply to demonstrate unity, or even just to find multiple meanings (although
that may be part of it); it is to compare and contrast these differing forms, to
discover how they relate to and impact on one another, be that in the manner of
conform ance, contestation, or com plem entation.37 It is no longer a matter of
sim ilarities, but of identifying a what, how, and why of both similarity and
difference.

II

The content of an object is itself a kind of form: but this immediately requires a
great deal of clarification. Combining content and form as a single entity, when the
two have long been understood in opposition to one another, at least in music,
creates some knotty problems and is ripe for misunderstanding (hence the
designation of Hanslick as a ‘form alist’ concerned only with musical form, thus
bypassing his argument entirely). One must first define both content and form, and
show how both of these relate to the identity of an object. According to literary
theory (and since most of this theoretical territory has been mapped out there it

37 These categories are taken from Cook, N., Analysing Musical Multimedia, pp. 98-106.
 74

would be wise to retain its terminology), content is understood as forming the

‘w hat’ of an object, and this is communicated by the ‘how’ of expression. To put it
in Louis Hjelmslev’s terms, there is a plane of content and a plane of expression,
and each of these has a ‘form .’38 The use of the term ‘form ’ by Hanslick, however,
cuts across the content-expression dichotomy, and the use of these terms in all
music theory is problematical, insofar as the distinction between what music
expresses, its content, and its means of expressing it, is difficult to sustain.
Indeed, this is precisely the point that the grammatically awkward phrase ‘tonend
bewegte F orm eri attempts to put across, and which I believe is a potential model
outside of music as well, on which more later.
Even if we limit ourselves to the content-plane (so far as this is possible),
‘form ’ describes a moulding or shaping of the material of content, a patterning that
is necessarily determined by the nature, which is to say the affective properties, of
the material in hand. Hanslick is not simply suggesting, then, that one takes note
of the form of the content so as to perform a replacement, a substitution of content
by the form that it takes, but that content in itself consists of a kind of pattern. The
‘w hat’ of a given object is comprehended as a pattern that embodies its unique
qualities. One must be careful, however, with the notion of pattern as the content
of an object (and not a representation of that content); pattern must not be
understood simply as a geometric entity, such that content has/is a shape,’ at
least, not in the sense of an object with a simple (i.e. unitary) identity. The pattern
has no single location; rather it is a modelling of a field of play, the relation of a set
of locations, at once noun and transitive verb. Simultaneously act and abstraction.
The idea that in order to comprehend an object one must do so
systemically, that is, understand its place within a set of objects rather than alone,
exists in several different fields. System theory is a branch of science of its own,
and informs thought on computer systems to ecology. In philosophy, W ittgenstein
stated that: ‘When we first begin to believe anything, what we believe is not a
single proposition, it is a whole system of propositions.’39 The most famous
form ulation of this idea, however, and certainly the most widely known, is that

38 H jelm slev, L., Prolegomena to a Theory o f Language, trans. W hitfield, F., (U n iversity of
W isco n sin Press, M adison, 1969).
39 W ittg e n ste in , L., On Certainty, (B lackw ell, O xford, 1969), §141.
 75

proposed by Ferdinand de Saussure in one of the founding texts of semiology, his

Course in G eneral Linguistics,40 The lesson most often drawn from this book is his
thesis that ‘in language there are only differences ... a difference generally implies
positive terms between which the difference is set up; but in language there are
only differences without positive terms. W hether we take the signified or the
signifier, language has neither ideas nor sounds that existed before the linguistic
system, but only conceptual and phonic differences that have issued from the
sys te m .41 W hat is less often noted is the continuation of this passage, in which
Saussure notes: ‘the statement that everything in language is negative is true only
if the signified and the signifier are considered separately; when we consider the
sign in its totality, we have something that is positive in its own class. ... Although
both the signified and the signifier are purely differential and negative when
considered separately, their combination is a positive fact.’42 Although Saussure’s
linguistic system is predicated entirely upon negative differentiation, the particular
network of relations that is set up both within and between the realms of ‘the
concept’ and phonic substance, a w ord’s ‘pattern’ of difference, is a means of
positive identification. That is, each word's negotiation of the relation of materiality
to a range of similar and conflicting concepts produces a distinctive quality by
which it can be identified. The content, however, which in the language system is
‘m eaning,’ is not localized upon any one word; rather it is permeated throughout
the system, determined not exclusively by its materiality, but by the productive
capacity of the network of relations to content across the system, such that
‘m eaning’ is an emergent property of the language system. ‘Within the same
language, all words used to express related ideas limit each other reciprocally;
synonyms like French redouter “dread,” craindre “fear,” and avoir peu r “be afraid”
have value only through their opposition: if redouter did not exist, all its content
would go to its competitors. Conversely, some words are enriched through contact
with others: e.g. the new element introduced in decrepit results from the co­
existence of decrepi. The value of just any term is accordingly determined by its

40 de Saussure, F., Course in General Linguistics, ed. Bally, C., and Sechehaye, A., trans.
Baskin, W., (Peter Owen, London, 1960).
41 Ibid., p. 120.
42 Ibid., p. 120.
 76

environm ent.’43 (Incidentally, the idea that language divides up a continuum of

experience, rather than parcelling up discrete quanta of precise concepts, is still
not universally recognized, as seen in recent texts by Christopher Small and Bryan
M agee.44) There is a degree of tension here, in the generation of positive identity
from the distinction between the pattern of content and the pattern of materiality,
insofar as the material qualities of the word cut across the distinction
content/expression by connecting outside the category of similar/differing concepts
to a range of assonant words (as Saussure himself explains), which complicates
the ‘environm ent’ and thus value of any term. This is not something that Saussure
seems to resolve completely, which may cause him to fix finally upon the word as
being not a purely relative entity, but as something with a concrete location. A
particular word is like the centre of a constellation; it is the point of convergence of
an indefinite number of co-ordinated term s.’45 This fixing upon a singular point, an
exact location rather than the locus of an equation seems to me to be mistaken,
and rather to undo the value of systemic, relational understanding that Saussure’s
model allows. It does not diminish the validity or impact of the systemic analysis of
an object in any way, however.
Understanding content, or anything else for that matter, as form or pattern
enables one to model the full complexity of aesthetic appreciation. A combining of
objects is no longer a straightforward addition of further properties, but a complex
intermingling, algebraic rather than arithmetic. For example, if a very simple object
is com prehended as a relational system of three points with three relations (and
any real object would be almost immeasurably more complex), and then combined
with a non-identical system also of three elements and relations, the result is not
defined as a system with six points, but rather one with fifteen relations, as
illustrated below.

43 Ibid., p. 116.
44 See Small, C., op. cit., pp 94ff., and Magee, B., Confessions of a Philosopher,
(Wiedenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1997), especially pp 76-82.
45 De Saussure, F., op. cit., p. 126.
 77

In any given system of ‘n’ points, the number of potential relations in that
system is given by the formula:

/ ( n) = 1/2 n ( n - 1 )
Therefore when two objects, ‘n’ and ‘x’ are combined, it can be seen that the
resultant is not simply the sum of the relations of n and x, but expressed as:

/(n + x ) = 1/4(n+x)((n+x) -1 ).

The consequent increase in complexity is thus shown by:

/(n + x )—/(n ) = 1/2[(n+x)((n+x)-1) - n(n-1)]

=1/4(2nx-x+x2)

or to put it more simply, one can state that:

/(n + x ) > / ( n) + /(x).

In short, what a systemic understanding tells us is that in either the combining of

two differing objects, or the supplementation of an existing object, the level of
com plexity produced is considerably greater, and thus also the need for accuracy,
than the more reductive model of unitary identity would suggest. One can apply
these ideas of complex identity to a range of concepts: the idea of style or genre
can be understood as a set of elements in systematic relation, both internally, and
in com parison with one another. Is a fugue written ‘in the style of Bach’ an
accurate reproduction of his method? Even though it may sound correct to the
modern ear in every respect, there may be one historical association that has been
 78

lost over time, such that it would sound quite unlike Bach to his contemporaries.
To paraphrase Thomas Carlyle, ‘in every object there is inexhaustible meaning;
the ear hears in it what the ear brings means of hearing.’46 Similarly, it explains
why two apparently similar objects can seem very easy to distinguish. An imitation
stone urn made from plastic will never appear quite like the genuine article,
however closely the colours and texture match, since the alteration of just one
elem ent will produce not one difference, but a whole set of different relations, a
com pletely new pattern.
One can see these principles at work in the music of Edgard Varese, based
upon the idea of crystalline structure. The crystal has no predetermined external
shape, but its internal structure, determined by the regular arrangement of one or
several ions, is a tightly defined pattern, and the manner of its growth (the form of
its expression, so to speak) is a result of the interaction of this pattern with the
medium in which it grows. The content-pattern of the crystal is the relative
positions of the ions that constitute it. One cannot point to any one of these ions
(even m etaphorically) and say ‘There it is, that is the pattern;’ the pattern is a result
of combination and arrangement. To put it in mathematical terms (which is, after
all, the language of the material) pattern is perm utational and combinatorial.
Varese writes:

The crystal is characterized by a definite external form and a definite internal structure.
The internal structure is built on the unit of crystal, the smallest grouping having the
order and composition of the substance. The extension of the unit into space forms
the whole crystal. In spite of the limited variety of internal structures, the external
forms of crystals are almost limitless. I believe this suggests, better than any
explanation I can give, the way my works are formed. One has an idea, the basis of
internal structure; it is expanded or split into different shapes or groups of sounds that

46 The actual quotation is ‘In every object there is inexhaustible meaning: the eye sees in it
what the eye brings means of seeing.’ Quoted by Raymond Briggs in response to his
critics in the paperback edition of Fungus the Bogeyman, (Hamish Hamilton, London,
1979), back cover.
 79

constantly change in shape, direction and speed, attracted or repelled by various

forces. The form is the consequence of this interaction.47

Thus Varese’s ‘musical idea' (which it should be stressed is an affair limited to

sonic material alone, and is in no sense ideal) equates to the 'unit of crystal,’ or
content-pattern of the musical work, which in turn might be equated with Hanslick’s
‘tonally moving form s.’ And although Varese’s compositional technique is a
deliberate attempt to effect a ‘corporealization of the intelligence that is in sound,’48
his implication is that all music is constructed (more or less successfully) out of
‘intelligent sounds.’
As many writers have noted, V arese’s crystalline approach to his music
em phasizes the spatial qualities of his sound world; indeed Varese cites his
encounter with the work of W ronski as being probably what first started me
thinking of music as spatial.’49 But Varese is neither unique nor original in
conceiving of his music this way (although he does foreground the issue to a
degree unseen previously); discussions of the spatiality of music are a recurrent
topic in musical aesthetics and analysis across the decades. Anthony Gilbert has
pointed out that the very term inology of music is replete with definitions and
directions that ‘require an apprehension of space or volume for their full
understanding,’50 and the analogy between music and architecture, or even
landscape, as an attempt to enact ‘the beautiful’ in form goes back centuries, and
is present in the arguments of nearly all commentators on music, including, for
instance, both Hanslick and Wagner. There are, however, two very distinct

47 Varese, E., quoted in Mellers, W., Music in a New Found Land, (Barrie and Rockliff,
London. 1964), p. 158.
48 I am indebted to Malcolm McDonald for the source of this quotation, the background to
which is discussed in the section ‘Wronski and ‘Intelligent Sounds” of his forthcoming
monograph on Var6se, currently still in manuscript at the time of writing. Varese showed
great fondness for this quotation, which he took from the nineteenth century Polish
mathematician Joseph-Maria Hoene Wronski, using it on more than one occasion.
49 Varese, E., again quoted by McDonald, op. cit., from a lecture entitled ‘Spatial Music,’
given at Sarah Lawrence College in 1959.
50 Gilbert, A., Musical Space: A Composer's View,’ in Critical Inquiry, vol. 7, (1980-1), p
605.
 80

schools of thought regarding how space is realized in music with differing

conceptions of musical form ,’ which might be characterized (in line with Saussure)
as being on the one hand a synchronic or paradigmatic approach, and on the other
hand a syntagmatic or diachronic one. Neither of these approaches need be
m utually exclusive of the other, but they do stem from two competing aesthetic
m odels of musical appreciation, the form er privileging the moment by moment,
sensory impact of sound, the latter requiring a contemplation of the musical work
(and it does depend upon the notion of the work) as a whole, at one remove from
its auditory presence. As it happens, these two approaches have become
entangled with musicological politics, theorists of popular music being more likely
to favour the former, while more conservative theorists tend to favour the latter,
with its emphasis on both canonized works and notated scores,51 but there is no
insurm ountable impediment to the application of either approach to any music.
W hich is not to say that they are unifiable: Edmund Gurney was wrestling with
reconciling the two views over a hundred years ago in his treatise The Power o f
Sound,52 but his inability finally to do so reflects more upon the difficulty of the task
he set himself than his own capabilities.53 Consideration of diachronic form in
term s of spatial metaphor, largely based on the concept of repetition of a musical
‘block,’ as in the balanced form of an A-B-A structure, has become fam iliar and
well understood through long standing use (and is the source of architectural
analogies), but to my mind is of limited use, certainly when attempting to relate
sounds to images. One might imagine this ‘spatialization’ of music to be an
effective means of comparison, but in practise the idea that ‘melodic contours
relate closely to the affect we perceive in the music,’ such that ‘jagged lines
produce music that seems anxious and intense’ or ‘lines with a narrow ambitus

51 On this point, see Brackett, D., Interpreting Popular Music, (Cambridge University Press,
1995), although the same point is made in innumerable texts.
52 Gurney, E., The Power of Sound, (Smith, Elder & Co., London, 1880).
53 This point is discussed in detail by Bojan Bujic in his essay ‘Form and Forming: From
Victorian Aesthetics to the Mid-twentieth-century Avant-garde,’ in Composition -
Performance - Reception, pp. 118-131.
 81

seem more meditative, not only seem s somewhat crass, but is also limiting in
im plying once again that music and image must conform to a unitary model. Note
Vernallis s assertion that ‘W e respond to imagery and music that work together to
reflect these spatial relationships.’55
The idea that an individual sound moment might be conceived of spatially
is seen considerably less often, although it is implicit in much music of the
twentieth century that took an increased interest in the importance of musical
timbre. The origin of this viewpoint, or certainly the first time at which it was
codified, was in the work of the physicist Hermann von Helmholtz in the mid­
nineteenth century. In his book On the Sensations o f Tone,56 the analysis of
sounds in terms of the overtone series that constitute them provides a spatial
model of any given sound that is both qualitative and quantitative, noting not only
the arrangem ent of frequencies, but also their amplitudes, the relation between
them determining the identity of a sound wave. Not only did this model produce a
spatial metaphor for sound identity, but his work on acoustics also incorporated the
actual spatiality within the uniqueness of a sound, since perceived sound is also
determ ined by the space in which it resonates. These suggestions are what
Gilbert refers to as ‘the truly essential nature of the [spatial] phenom enon,’5' and is
probably what Varese had in mind when speaking of his music as spatial,’58 but
this conception of music on its own is flawed fundamentally. Varese attempted to
‘com pose out’ the implicit spatiality of an initial sound or group of sounds, but even
by attempting to do so he introduced syntagmatic spatiality, and even had he not,
the very model of the spatial is ill-suited and insufficient for a sound event
predicated upon oscillations that necessarily take place in time. The diachronic
model is similarly lacking when examined closely: it is tenable only if one overlooks

54 Vernallis, C., op. cit., pp. 158-9. Vernallis also cites Leonard Meyer’s Style and Music,
(Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), pp. 128-9, but she could as easily
have cited any number of authors.
55 Ibid., p. 159.
56 Helmholtz, H., On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of
Music, trans., Ellis, A.J., (London, 1885).
57 Gilbert, A., op. cit., p. 606.
58 Varese was clearly familiar with the work of Helmholtz, and would frequently cite it as an
influence upon his music.
 82

the tem poral aspect of music, which might be argued to be its most im portant
quality. The balance and symmetry of an A-B-A structure exists for just as long as
one ignores that the second A section, unlike the first, is heard both as a repetition
in relation to its first airing and in relation to the B section - the experience is a
dynam ic one, unfolding not in three dimensions but in four. And here we run up
against the limits of modelling either music or the moving image as being
straightforwardly spatial, or representable by pattern alone. Any musical work is of
necessity an integration of both of these forms of spatiality, a point made explicit
by Pierre Boulez, of whom Varese may be regarded as a precursor. Boulez took
V a rese’s concept of the sound-object, but chose to superpose it with an overall
system, rather than attempt to ‘grow ’ the sound, like a crystal. As both Bojan Bujic
and A listair Williams have noted, Boulez’s notion of the relationship between static
spatiality and temporal spatiality is a dialectical one, as expressed in his essay ‘Le
system e et I'idee. ’

Boulez’s notion of musical material ... is realised by the system manifesting itself in
terms of the structural properties of the music, but relinquishing its grip sufficiently to
allow local and contingent configurations thrown up by the material to have an intrinsic
role in the musical discourse. The dialectic of system and idea is conceived in terms
commensurate with the Adornian dialectic of concept and object. The musical idea is
an object whose specificity eludes complete control by the system, yet which is in need
o f manipulation by the system. The system organises the musical object, yet
recognises its concreteness and its ability to generate local configurations.59

In placing the two aspects of musical space in a dialectical relation Boulez has
gone some way to reconcile these two strains of thought in music history, but not
quite, I believe, far enough. The connection of ‘system ’ and ‘idea’ or particle, is not
merely a dialectical one of mutual influence, but one of fused identity, certainly in
the instance of its reception, what Nattiez would call the ‘aesthesic’ realm. Any
given system is a conglomeration of its parts, an emergent property, and attempts

59 Williams, A., "Repons’: phantasmagoria or the articulation of space?’ in Pople, A. (ed ),

Theory, analysis and meaning in music, (Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 199-200.
 83

to control a system or distort it will be successful only insofar as one can add
things to the set of relations in order to weight the system. One can try to conceal,
or overwhelm a system, but one cannot efface any part of it; the system is an
em ergent property of the set of particles that constitute it, and each particle is
understood in relation to those with which it is connected. It is no longer a
question of space or time, or even space and time, but a fusion of the two; spaces
in m otion - Einsteinian space-time. One can see an articulation of this fusion in
the video of the Chemical Brothers’ ‘Star G uitar,’ which takes the form of a
landscape as viewed from a moving train. Musical elements or ‘sound objects’ are
made coincident with physical objects - for example, the repeated kick drum on
the first beat of each bar is accompanied by the passing of a concrete pillar, a
passing train coincides with each repetition of a high synthesizer riff - and different
landscapes, be they urban or rural, accompany different sections of the music.
Not only is the music’s ‘spatiality’ thus made visible, but the viewer positioning is
such that one can see the musical space that one has passed through receding
into the distance. Both the immediate space of the musical object and the
‘architectural’ space of the m usic’s passing through time are made available.
Even this, however, can not be regarded as a representation of music, but
only as an adjunct to it. Sound itself is not an object in space but an oscillation;
even if one inscribes a locus rather than a location, that locus must itself then be
extended in time - it is impossible to plot sound in a three dimensional pattern.
Note once more that Hanslick defined the content of music as being ‘tonend
bewegte Formen.' Even the individual ions of Varese’s crystal model are not static
but constantly vibrating; matter itself is a condensate of energy waves in motion. A
set of relations is never a fixed pattern, but a pattern that is itself in oscillation. The
principle of identity being an emergent property of a dynamic process has long
been understood in chemistry. The standard test for the identity of a metal present
in a compound is the flame test, in which the compound is held over a flame, and
the colour of the resultant flame gives the identity of the metal. The physics behind
this involves the promotion of electrons into higher energy states than they would
normally occupy by the heat of the flame, and as they fall back into their usual rest
state this energy is given up as light of a particular frequency. Thus it is the
change in energy of this process, the relation of two different states of oscillation,
that reveals the particular identity of the metal. In the words of Plato, ‘W henever
 84

we see anything in a process of change, for example fire, we should speak of it not
as being a thing but as having a quality.'60 Representational pattern can either
m ap the location of an interaction, or the motion of a locale, but not both, which is
to say, the motion of an interaction - the diagram is no longer sufficient; to employ
all necessary dimensions one must move to the equation. (I am put in mind here
of the physicist’s attempt to model in two dimensions the warping of three-
dim ensional space by showing how heavy objects distort the regular grid pattern of
a taut rubber sheet. This quite literally leaves a great deal to the imagination.) To
attem pt to represent the pattern of the object is to miss the object altogether, to
encounter it only tangentially; representation of pattern-equation involves a
m athematical differentiation of its actuality, be that with respect to time or space,
with a consequent loss of information.
It is, then, perhaps unsurprising that Edmund Gurney in 1880 failed to
make the leap to an Einsteinian relativistic frame of space-time, both conceived of
as a single entity. And it is important to realize that this reconsideration of space
involves more than just adding one more dimension: the move from space to
space-tim e requires one to make one’s own status part of the equation, in that the
m ovem ent of the observer is a factor of the observed, as well as the reverse.
Relations that were a question of distance are now functions of their velocities; the
pattern is always-already motile. Henri Lefebvre writes:

Modem science suggests that rather than think of space as a container or bodies as
“things” in space, we grasp the organism as a centre for the production of space
around itself - space is not external to the body but generated by it. ... Such analysis
needs to be completed by a rhythm analysis in which time is then grasped in its spatial
form. ... Spatial practice is on this level most concretely articulated in the various
historical and cultural systems of gestuality 61

60 Plato, Timaeus, 49d, trans., Lee, H.D.P , (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1965), p. 67.
61 Lefebvre, H., cited as an unpublished manuscript dated 1983, quoted by Berland J., in
‘Sound, Image and Social Space: Music Video and Media Reconstruction,' in Sound and
Vision: The Music Video Reader, p. 35.
 85

The point is no longer just to identify where precisely something is in space, but to
understand the way the entirety of space-tim e is engineered and modulated, its
harm onies and discordances, and the way these oscillations resonate and interact.
The sim ple algebra and diagrams above clearly no longer suffice, but there is a
m athem atics and a geometry in existence designed for this task, namely the
m athem atics of quantum mechanics and non-Euclidean geometry. The very
difficult mathematics of quantum mechanics are way beyond the technical
capabilities of the writer, but the concepts and phenomena they describe and
predict enable considerable insight into notions of perception, and hence
aesthetics. The idea that an object might simultaneously be a material entity and a
set of oscillations, or rather, that these two things are one and the same, will be
fam iliar to anyone who has studied elementary particle physics and the wave
equations of Schrodinger that accompany it. The similarity between Barthes’
assertion that the idea of signifiance is theoretically locatable but not
describable’62 and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, which states that it is
im possible to simultaneously know the position and momentum of a quantum
particle-event, is all the more striking for the fact that they were almost certainly
developed independently. The riddle of Schrodinger’s cat was form ulated to show
the absurdity of observing quantum phenomena at the level of the object, but it told
us more about rethinking our ways of perceiving the world than it did about flaws in
quantum theory.
The model of relationality demonstrated the complexity of perception and
object comparison, but it did not go nearly far enough. Basic algebra could show
the quantitative aspect of pattern relation in simple numerative terms, but could tell
us nothing about the quality of those relations in space-time: their oscillation,
intensity, duration, in short, everything about an object that individuates it rather
than simply quantifying it. The object is not number, but matrix, and the composite
object extends in further dimensions still. Heisenberg showed that in quantum
theory the combination of 1+1 could be performed in such a way as to equal more
than two, and the complex commutation of matrix mechanics, developed to model
the behaviour of material systems, shows that this is true of the physical realm
also.

62 Barthes, R., The Third Meaning,’ in Image -Music-Text, p. 65.

 86

III

So far, so abstract, one might think, but this rethinking of the object inspired by
H anslick’s formulation leads to a conception of identity (and thus composite
identities) that has already been effected via a different route in the work of
Deleuze and Guattari. They write:

There is a mode of individuation very different from that of a person, subject, thing, or
substance. We reserve the name haecceity for it. A season, a winter, a summer, an
hour, a date have perfect individuality lacking nothing, even though this individuality is
different from that of a thing or a subject. They are haecceities in the sense that they
consist entirely o f relations of movement and rest between molecules or particles,
capacities to affect and be affected.63

And they go on to show the presence of such individuations in the literature of

W oolf and Proust, in haiku poetry, in an instance of rubato in Chopin. The problem
is not that of finding and identifying haecceities, however, but of delimiting them.
The haecceity occupies a range of registers of existence, fragmenting and
exceeding what might be regarded as the classical conception of the ‘object.’
Having established a systemic model of relationality in the place of the object, the
boundaries that demarcate ‘object’ have become fluid, if not invisible. This is not
to say that the object is floating freely, unrestricted; if anything it is the reverse.
Rather, the world itself, what might be termed Lebenswelt in the jargon of
phenomenology, has been systematized, aestheticized. Barthes notes:

Just as Einsteinian science demands that the relativity of the frames of reference be
included in the object studied, so the combined action of Marxism, Freudianism and
structuralism demands, in literature, the relativization of the relations of writer, reader
and observer (critic). Over against the traditional notion of the work, for long - and still

63 Deleuze, G., and Guattari, F., op. cit., p. 261.

 87

- conceived of in a, so to speak, Newtonian way, there is now the requirement o f a

new object, obtained by the sliding or overturning of former categories. That object is
the Text64

The reassignation of the object as pattern ‘dem ands’ a shift from ‘work’ to ‘text,’
and consequently a new way of approaching the object, now a subset of ‘w orld.’
The full implications of Barthes’ category of object that was ‘locatable but not
describable’ now become apparent. The question of ‘w hat’ an object is, at least in
its classical formulation of meanings, origins, causes and reasons, is not one that
can be realistically answered; to do so would be to step outside one’s own
conceptual box, an attempt to ‘use language to get outside language,’65 to borrow
W ittgenstein’s formulation of the problem. For Barthes to describe what he
perceived in the film still would require him to describe the entire culture, or form
of life’ in Wittgensteinian terms, the complete network of which that object, in all its
complexity, was part. This is of course unfeasible, but is also in a way
unnecessary, given there is likely to be considerable agreement in form of life
between ‘w riter’ and ‘reader.’ Thus one presents the space(s) occupied by the
object in the network; one can say ‘w here’ it is (or better, where it moves) rather
than ‘w hat’ it is; the linguistic trace of this idea is made clear when we talk about’
something, instead of speaking it exactly. As Barthes himself put it: textual
analysis ... is henceforth less a question of explaining or even describing, than of
entering into the play of the signifiers; of enumerating them, perhaps (if the text
allows), but not hierarchising them .’66 As with W ittgenstein’s criticism of Freud,
what is required is not (causal) explanation, but clarification of a perception, an
attem pt to ‘confer blatancy on what was immanent to it.’67 Aesthetic experience
does not prompt a search for the origin of the source of that experience, but a

64 Barthes, R., ‘From Work to Text,' in Image-Music-Text, p. 156.

65 Wittgenstein, L., Philosophical Remarks, trans. Hargreaves, R., and White, R.,
(Blackwell, Oxford, 1975), p. 54.
56 Barthes, R., ‘Theory of the Text,’ in Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader, ed.
Young, R., (Routledge, London and New York, 1981), p. 43.
67 Cioffi, F., op. cit., p. 202.
 88

relation of that event to one's own previous experience and to the ‘web of
culture. 8

A further, and perhaps even m ore radical consequence of this conception

of the world is the necessary binding of the subject to any consideration of the
object. This idea has a long history (at least outside the Anglo-Saxon
epistem ological tradition69) that predates the work of Einstein by nearly a century.
The Hegelian dialectic, predicated on the idea of locating an active subject position
distinct from the secure subject of Cartesian epistemology, performs the same
theoretical movement, such that T hings exist in themselves, but their truth will
em erge only through the steady incorporation of their determinations in the
dialectical whole of Spirit. W hat makes the object truly itself is simultaneously
w hat turns its face towards humanity, for the principle of its being is at one with the
root of our own subjectivity.’70 This subject, however, is not the same subject as
that of the text, but an Ideal subject, present to itself. Idealist philosophy’s
avoidance of the sensuous materiality of art and language, and the production of
the subject in this is outlined by Julia Kristeva, who sees in aesthetics a ‘second
overturning of the Hegelian dialectic’ (the first being the political economy of Marx).
It is not just that the subject considers the object in its self knowing, but is
produced in and by the art object: T h e subject is only the signifying process and
he appears only as a signifying practice, that is, only when he is absent within the
position out of which social, historical, and signifying activity unfolds. The
subject that is just a product of the system from which it emerges is a very different
subject to that of either Kant or Hegel, and much closer to what W ittgenstein
describes as a form of life.’ In the linguistic universe of the later W ittgenstein, the
notions of ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ are stripped of their privileged connection to

68 The phrase is Gary Tomlinson’s, but is derived from his reading of the sociologist Clifford
Geertz See The Web of Culture. A Context for Musicology,’ in Nineteenth Century Music,
vol. 7, (1983-4), pp. 350-62.
69 See the essay of Montefiore, A., and Taylor, C., ‘From an analytical perspective,’ that
introduces Kortian, G., Metacritique The philosophical argument of Jurgen Habermas,
trans., Raffan, J., (Cambridge University Press, 1980), for a discussion of the relation the
ideas of Hegel and Kant to the Anglo-Saxon philosophical tradition.
70 Eagleton, T., The Ideology of the Aesthetic, pp. 122-3.
71 Kristeva, J., Revolution in Poetic Language, p. 215.
 89

‘reality.’ They become different ‘language-gam es,’ different positions one might
take up within the system of one’s own form of life. Since the idea of a ‘private
language' is shown to be nonsensical by W ittgenstein, and language is the
medium in which we apprehend the world, one’s experience of the world is
necessarily intersubjective. ‘It is what human beings say that is true and false; and
they agree in the language they use. That is not agreement in opinions but in form
of life 2 Moreover, a W ittgensteinian ‘language’ is far more than the set of words
that are available, but a composite of all the possible ‘language-gam es,’ or modes
of expression, that are in use by a form of life. A language is thus a set of
practices, based upon the culture and the capabilities of the group that use it. And
as Jean-Jacques Nattiez notes, these practices may be so well ingrained as to no
longer constitute a distinct set of actions in themselves, but instead be an
unquestionable mode of being, stating ‘among the Japanese, the succession
“waiting followed by rapid and violent action” is less a literary structure than a
typical schema of behaviour, a cultural scheme and a way of being.’73 Hence,
when W ittgenstein states that If a lion could talk, we could not understand him ,’74
the point is that the activity of being a lion is so different from our own as to be
incomprehensible. As to the similarity of different human forms of life, W ittgenstein
equivocates: on the one hand he states T h e common behaviour of mankind is a
system of reference by means of which we interpret an unknown language,’75 but
on the other, ‘One human being can be a complete enigma to another. W e learn
this when we come into a strange country with entirely strange traditions; and,
what is more, even given a mastery of a country’s language. W e do not
understand the people. (And not because of not knowing what they are saying to
them selves.)’76 Thus the connection between different human ‘languages’ (in the
broad sense) is like that between different language-games, insofar as there is
overlap and familiarity, sufficient to comprehend what is going on. Unlike
language-games, though, in order to understand, one must be fam iliar with the

72 Wittgenstein, L, Philosophical Investigations, §241.

73 Nattiez, J.-J., ‘Can One Speak of Narrativity in Music?, trans. Ellis, K., Journal of the
Royal Musical Association, vol. 115:2, p. 250.
74 Wittgenstein, L., Philosophical Investigations, p. 223.
75 Ibid., §206.
76 Ibid., p. 223.
 90

system as a whole, to see not only the elements but also the way in which each is
connected to the others. Understanding, and thus aesthetic appreciation, is a
com plex process of relation: one cannot properly understand either a part of the
system alone, or the whole system from the outside. One must be part of that
system. ‘Does the theme point to nothing beyond itself? Oh yes! But that means:
- The impression it makes on me is connected with things in its surroundings - e.g.
with the existence of the German language and of its intonation, but that means
with the whole field of our language gam es.’77 A distinction between subject and
object is no longer essential, for W ittgenstein, to aesthetic appreciation of an
artistic practice. One does not explain the object, and one cannot explain the
system, which constitutes one’s own frame of reference; instead one clarifies the
spatio-tem poral relations of an artistic practice to other kinds of practices, or
language-games.
This mode of W eltanschauung (world-understanding) is broadly compatible
with that of Deleuze and Guattari, who similarly see fit to dispense with the notion
of subject altogether, redesignating the systemic object and subject alike as
haecceities:

We must avoid an oversimplified connection, as though there were on the one hand
formed subjects, of the thing or person type, and on the other hand spatiotemporal co­
ordinates of the haecceity type. For you will yield nothing to haecceities unless you
realize that that is what you are, and that you are nothing but that. . . . It should not be
thought that a haecceity consists simply of a decor or backdrop that situates objects, or
of appendages that hold things and people to the ground. It is the entire assemblage
in its individuated aggregate that is a haecceity.78

However, they do differ on how one regards the conditions of being for the system
as a whole itself. For Deleuze and Guattari the formation of haecceities takes
place in a defined space, the ‘plane of consistency,’ which is both 'a geometrical
plane’ and ‘a plane o f ... univocality.’79 By contrast, the form of life is precisely not

77 Wittgenstein, L., Culture and Value, revised edition, ed., von Wright, G.H., (Blackwell,
Oxford, 1998), 59e.
78 Deleuze, G, and Guattari, F., op. cit., p. 262.
79 Ibid., p. 266.
 91

univocal: even though within the system one must understand the part holistically,
the system as a whole lies outside the purview of any part of that system. Even
though one understands the part holistically, the whole remains beyond
understanding since it has no exterior point of reference. ‘W hat has to be
accepted, the given, is - so one could say - forms o f life.’80 The whole is not a
unitary entity, but an emergent product of a collective energy, a ‘plural totality’ in
Kristeva’s terms. In this sense it is far closer to the Derridean reading of chora
than it is to the ‘plane of consistency.’ ‘It does not have the characteristics of an
existent, by which we mean an existent that would be receivable in the ontologic,
that is, those of an intelligible o r sensible existent. There is chora, but the chora
does not exist.’81
Derrida, of course, was addressing the idea of ‘chora’ in the light of the
work of Kristeva in Revolution in Poetic Language, and she in turn had ‘borrowed’
(her own word) it from a passage of Plato’s Timaeus.82 Kristeva describes chora
initially as being ‘not yet a position that represents something for someone (i.e., it
is not yet a sign); nor is it yet a position that represents someone for another
position (i.e., it is not yet a signifier either); it is, however, generated in order to
attain to this signifying position. Neither model nor copy, the chora precedes and
underlies figuration and thus specularization, and is analogous only to vocal or
kinetic rhythm,’ and as ‘a modality of signifiance in which the linguistic sign is not
yet articulated as the absence of an object and as the distinction between real and
sym bolic.’83 One can, however, draw a distinction between this relatively abstract
notion of chora and the specific instance of the ‘semiotic chora,’ in which ‘the
social’ ‘imprints its constraint in a mediated form which organizes the chora not
according to a law but through an ordering,'84 (although it should be noted that

80
Wittgenstein, L., Philosophical Investigations, p. 226.
81 Derrida, J , ‘Khora’ (rewritten throughout as ‘chora’ for reasons of consistency), in The
Derrida Reader: Writing Performances, ed. Wolfreys, J., (Edinburgh University Press,
1998), p. 237.
82 Plato, ibid., 48d-53, pp. 67-72.
83 Kristeva, J., Revolution in Poetic Language, p. 26.
84 Ibid., p. 27. It is also worth noting that Deleuze and Guattari briefly touch on (and reject)
the idea of a 'semiotic chora’ (ibid., p. 65), but do not mention chora again, despite its
similarity to their notion of the ‘plane of consistency.’
 92

Kristeva herself does not make this distinction explicit). In this process chora is
m ade geometric, in as much as this ordering ‘fixes the chora in place and reduces
it.’85 The idea of form of life seems to fall somewhere between this transition from
the Platonic idea of chora, to an instance of the chora, through its h a b ita tio n into a
Freudian system of drives, being neither so abstract as the former, nor as
determ ined as the latter. As suggested above, the reading of chora that most
readily approximates to the social and biological character of a form of life is that of
Derrida, as when he writes:

Chora “means " place occupied by someone, country, habited place, marked place,
rank, post, assigned position, territory, or region. And in fact, chora will always already
be occupied, invested, even as a general place, and even when it is distinguished from
everything that takes place in it Whence the difficulty . . . of treating it as an empty or
geometric, or even, and this is what Heidegger will say of it, as that which prepares the
Cartesian space.86

It is this fusion of the abstract and the concrete achieved in the fam iliar Derridean
‘always already’ that makes this so similar to the ‘form of life.’ The positing of a
capacity is coexistent with its realization, neither preceding the other. The social
field does not expand into space; instead the expansion of the social generates a
new space. There is a potential dynamism of the social in Derrida and
W ittgenstein that Kristeva seems to close off, if not disavow entirely, in semiotizing
chora through the body of the mother, and hence the Lacanian phallus.8' It would
be unfair to compare Kristeva to a dishonest taxi driver, as Cioffi does Freud,88 that
takes one on a gratuitously long journey to a destination that was round the corner,
but there is a degree of this in Revolution in Poetic Language. Having suggested
that the semiotic chora is no more than the plane where the subject is both
generated and negated, the place where his unity succumbs before the process of

85 Ibid., p. 240n 15.

8fi
Derrida, J., ‘Khora,’ op. cit, p. 246.
87 Kristeva, J., Revolution in Poetic Language, p. 26 and p. 241 n.22.
88 Although he is at this point writing in lieu of Wittgenstein. See Cioffi, F., op. cit., p. 225.
 93

charges and stases that produce him ,’89 and then dem onstrated how this subject is
then undone in and through language in the very act of his production, we are left
in the end with linguistic and artistic practice.90 The subject is offered only to be
withdrawn, and what remains seems very much like the elements of a form of life,
having been put through a psychoanalytic mill. However, although Kristeva has
taken us a great distance only to arrive very close to where we started, she has
furnished us with a range of analytic tools along the way. W ittgenstein (after
Hegel) had already reconceived the object as a set of dynamic relations, as
khoros, above all as practise: Kristeva performs this move all over again (in a more
explicit way), but she also introduces the idea of the social in the form of the
‘sym bolic,’ which brings a critical potential to the form of life that is often thought to
be missing. Montefiore and Taylor note that T o the Wittgensteinian, critical
theorists may appear as just another band of fools rushing about over the ground
which has just been so carefully cleared by the assembled reminders about the
ways in which our language works; conversely, to critical theorists the
W ittgensteinian may come across as preaching an obscurantist acceptance of the
status quo.'9' Kristeva shows that it is possible after all to understand chora or
form of life critically through the theory of text (although this is only a partial
understanding), without stepping outside one’s own conceptual box (even if the
Oedipal model of the social she deploys would have been an anathema to
W ittgenstein in its determinism). If we return to an earlier analogy for a moment, it
m ight be said that in the same way that gravity is a warping of space-time, such
that bodies are not directly aware of this except so far as their motion is weighted
towards a massive body, so the form of life/system distorts, but does not
predetermine, the limits of one's horizon. And it is through an interrogation of the
social that one can become aware of this process of distortion.

89
Kristeva, J., Revolution in Poetic Language, p. 28.
90
Ibid., pt. IV, sec. 5, The Second Overturning of the Dialectic: After Political Economy,
Aesthetics,’ pp. 214-6.
91 Montefiore, A., and Taylor, C., op. cit., p. 21.
 94

IV

Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable, and see if we may not eff it after all.92

G iven that the object has been superseded (at least theoretically) by a set of
dynam ic relations, it is worth asking how one begins to perceive anything from the
m ass of information the senses receive. How does one cut through the holism of
the system so as to apprehend apparently discrete units, and what is the mode of
that apprehension? W hether one turns to Hanslick or Wagner, W ittgenstein or
Kristeva, there is a truly remarkable convergence of opinion on this topic; a
reiteration of Hanslick’s wish to reinstate the role of the sensuous in perception,
grounded in the capacities of the human body. As Terry Eagleton notes, Thought,
to be sure, is more than just a biological reflex: it is a specialized function of our
drives which can refine and spiritualize them over time. But it remains the case
that everything we think, feel and do moves within a frame of interests rooted in
our “species being,” and can have no reality independently of this.’93 As discussed
earlier, we need to understand our relationships to the Lebenswelt not only
quantitatively, identifying connection, but also qualitatively, in identifying the
properties of those relations, and one’s means of doing this lie in the realm of the
senses, of affect. This is a return to the original project of aesthetics as formulated
by the eighteenth-century philosopher Alexander Baumgarten: an attempt to
cognize the world of sensation that lay outside of Kantian reason. Although the
discipline of aesthetics grew increasingly distant from its initial raison d ’etre over
tim e, a strain of it remains in the thought of Schelling, of Nietzsche and
W ittgenstein, and has become a fam iliar trope of Cultural Studies over the past
twenty years, to the extent that ‘few literary texts are likely to make it nowadays
into the new historicist canon unless they contain at least one mutilated body.’94 A
m odel based upon the idea that ‘the physical and sensuous experience of human

92 Adams, D,, Dirk Gently 's Holistic Detective Agency, (Pan Books, London, 1988), p 150.
93 Eagleton, T., The Ideology of the Aesthetic, p. 235.
94 Ibid , p. 7.
 95

beings and our bodily experience of the world '15 is a prerequisite of understanding,
will necessarily privilege the biological facts of the sense organs in our relation to
the material. This is not to say, however, that different materials impacting on
different sensory modes are irredeemably distinct to the extent that they are
unrelatable: the semiotic chora is a ‘continuum ,’90 and although each mode may
have a specific type of pattern, it is pattern nonetheless. Acknowledging the
m aterial specificity, the ‘untranslatability’ of an object need not make a comparison
of their affective qualities impossible, once they are grounded in ‘the bottom of all
purely human art - that of plastic bodily m ovem ent.'97 W ittgenstein wrestled with
this process of comparison for many years, particularly as it related to music, and
finally concluded that 'there just is no paradigm there other than the theme. And
yet again there is a paradigm other than the theme: namely the rhythm of our
language, of our thinking and feeling And furtherm ore the theme is a new part of
our language, it becomes incorporated in it; we learn a new gesture.'98 This
adoption of the concept of gesture as a human equivalent (and not a
representation) of a specific affective entity late in his career (the above was
written just five years before his death), is an important step in his last writings,
w ith wide-ranging ramifications.
It should be stressed that gesture as a term here encompasses a great
deal more than gesticulation alone. Gesture is the resultant of the interaction of
the material and the social, the negotiation of object and world; it is a spatio-
tem poral actualization or corporealization of what Idealists would term essence; it
is the space-time of affect, where material becomes sensuous and intermingles
with the social body in a specific pattern-event, two modes of oscillation combining
to produce a movement, khoros. Here is the beating of the body in Barthes
‘R asch,’ the music affecting the body and the body inside the m usic.99 W hen

95 Small, C., op. cit., p. 104

96
Kristeva, J., Revolution in Poetic Language, pp. 28-9.
97 Wagner, R., The Artwork of the Future,’ op. cit., p. 63.
98
Wittgenstein, L., Culture and Value, p. 59e.
99 This phrase is Robert Samuels’, and is discussed in ‘Music as text: Mahler, Schumann
and issues in analysis,’ in Theory, Analysis and Meaning in Music, ed. Pople, A.,
(Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 152-163.
 96

Barthes asks ‘W hat does my body know ?’100 the answer is gesture. Thus gesture
is the subject and the object in combination; not a translation, not a representation,
but thing and apprehension in one. As Paul Johnson puts it, in writing of music:

The phrase says something, but something which cannot be paraphrased - it says
itself It makes a unique gesture, but the significance of that gesture can be explored
by relating it to the network of possibilities against which it has meaning. ... What is at
stake is not the substitution of one general sign for another; rather it involves finding a
link between two incommensurate realms, both of which get their importance from their
connection to human life and feeling.101

Certainly this phenomenon, binding the material qualities of an object indissolubly

to o n e ’s understanding of it, is easiest to recognize in music, unencumbered as it
is by the need to represent anything outside of itself, but it is common to all
objects. For Saussure the words tree, Baum , and arbre were interchangeable,
despite the fact that this contradicted his own theories regarding the ‘environm ent’
of a word (see above). But for W ittgenstein the phonic constitution of a word
creates a ‘corona’ that is key to the precision of its use (and hence meaning), as in
his discussion of the concept of the ‘if-feeling,’ which compares the word with a
m usical phrase,102 in such a way that ‘the word [if] ... becomes a gesture of if-
ne ss.’IOJ One sees here, in this reclamation of the material, a restitution of the
‘m usicality’ of language, but it might as well be the ‘m usicalization’ of any object or
art form. The Romantic encounter with ‘the ineffable’ that E.T.A. Hoffmann found
in music seems to me to have been inextricably related to an encounter with the
sensuous, since that which is inexpressible might be found in language also,
hence Kristeva's analysis of symbolist poets. This is, however, the sensuous as
social actant, and the ‘inexpressible’ as something held in the interstices of

101 Barthes, R , Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Howard, R., (Vintage,
London, 2000), p. 9
101
Johnson, P., Wittgenstein: Rethinking the Inner, (Routledge, London and New York,
1993), p. 110.
1L‘ Wittgenstein, L., Philosophical Investigations, pp. 181-3.
103 Johnson, P., op. cit., p. 116.
 97

language, rather than a transcendence of the social. Indeed, the very idea of an
encounter with the ineffable is rather odd, since if one encounters it, it must have
been expressed: in W ittgenstein’s words, 'if only you do not try to utter what is
unutterable then nothing gets lost. On the contrary, the unutterable will be -
unutterably - contained in what has been uttered.’104 And this same point is
repeated time and again in Barthes’ writing on the experience of signifiance, those
m oments where meaning is temporarily obliterated to reveal - the grain of the
voice, that part of the cinematic image ‘that does not represent anything, '05 the
phonism of speech (in ‘Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers’)106 - much as the
obliteration of the sun in an eclipse reveals its own, normally invisible, corona. In
any moment where one ceases to pursue what Hanslick termed ‘the chimera of
m eaning,’10, the fullness of gesture, which is to say the undoing of one’s own
subjecthood in a dialectic of the social and the material, may be glimpsed.
Perhaps the most immediate aesthetic ramification of gesture, however, is
its dynamism. The world of gesture is no longer a world of beings, but of doings,
processes rather than products. Small writes: ‘Music is not a thing at all but an
activity, something that people do. The apparent thing “m usic” is a figment, an
abstraction of the action, whose reality vanishes as soon as we examine it at all
closely. '08 This reconceptualization of the abstract ‘m usic’ as the act of
‘m usicking’ is the touchstone of Christopher Sm all’s attempt to reinscribe the social
character of music at the heart of the discipline, and indeed at the heart of all the
arts, so as to render all artistic endeavour ‘perform ative.’ Furthermore, he states
that the process of social inscription undertaken in musicking is such that T h e act
of musicking establishes in the place where it is happening a set of relationships,
and it is in those relationships that the meaning of the act lies.’109 Sm all’s
em phasis upon locating meaning is perhaps the reason for his repetition of the
now familiar pursuit of unity, this time in the concept of ritual, which he terms ‘the

104 Wittgenstein, L., in a letter to Paul Englemann, quoted in Johnson, P, ibid., p. 115.
105 Barthes, R , The Third Meaning: Research notes on some Eisenstein stills,’ in Image-
Music-Text, p. 61.
106 Ibid., p. 207.
10 Hanslick, E., op. cit., p. 44
10c Small, C., op. cit., p. 2.
109 Ibid.. p. 13.
 98

great unitary art in which all of what we today call the arts ... have their origin.’110
He is correct, however, it seems to me, in dem onstrating that the idea of gesture,
as a set of dynamic relations, is a means of successfully comparing (although not
necessarily uniting) differing art forms.
The experience of a particularly striking aesthetic impression will almost
always elicit a desire for knowledge and discussion of that experience, and the
form that this takes is often the search for an explanation of the phenomenon. ‘I
should like to say: “These notes say something glorious, but I do not know what."
These notes are a powerful gesture, but I cannot put anything side by side with it
that will serve as an explanation.'111 But as W ittgenstein suggests, to seek an
explanation is to miss the point of the phenomenon. To ‘explain’ it, and find its
‘m eaning,’ is to translate it into something else, to step away from the phenomenon
that inspired one in the first place. Instead, what is required is an elucidation of the
event, a clarification of the relationships involved: ‘Understanding a sentence lies
nearer than one thinks to what is ordinarily called understanding a musical theme.
... In order to ‘explain’ I could only compare it with something else which has the
sam e rhythm (I mean the same pattern).’112 And as Cioffi notes, ‘W hat this
am ounts to is an attempt to provide an equivalent in a different modality for the
experience we wish to characterize or elucidate.’113 The particular gesture that
expresses an aesthetic experience is specific and untranslatable: one cannot
explain it. One can, however, compare it to other gestures, relate it to previous
experiences, both those with the same material component and without, in
different modes. Velvet, double cream, the descending Ch arpeggio played on the
lower middle register of an old Moog synthesizer that opens the Kid A album by
Radiohead: clearly these are entirely distinct phenomena, and yet there are
underlying similarities that most people would recognize - their patterns of identity,
gestures, overlap. As Barthes notes:

110 Ibid., p. 106.

11 Wittgenstein, L., Philosophical Investigations, §610.
112 Ibid., §527.
11' Cioffi, F., op. cit., p. 69.
 99

Rhetorics inevitably vary by their substance (here articulated sound, there image,
gesture, or whatever) but not necessarily by their form. ... Thus the rhetoric o f the
image (that is to say, the classification of its connotators) is specific to the extent that it
is subject to the physical constraints of vision (different, for example, from phonatory
constraints) but general to the extent that the ‘figures’ are never more than formal
relations of elements.1'''

There is no overarching identity to unify and explain these similarities, but there
are resemblances nevertheless, like those of a family, or the overlapping concepts
that constitute the word ‘gam e’ for Wittgenstein. It follows that any response to an
aesthetic phenomenon conceived of as gesture is always already a composite
experience, cutting across different modes in such a way as to bring out
resem blances without ever compromising specificity or identity. 'It is through
gesture (i.e. rhythm of movement) that the spatial and temporal arts are linked.
The two share a common temporal-spatial universe, albeit working within it to
different ends.'115 The distinction between different musical objects is perceived as
readily as that between objects of similar gesture presented in different modes of
perception. An apparent attempt to explore this notion can be observed in Michel
G ondry's video to Daft Punk's Around the W orld.’ The five musical instruments
that make up the piece each have a commensurate group of four dancers, and
their movement in musical space is echoed by the choreography of the dancers
around a small circular set. Thus the rising and falling of the bass line coincides
w ith the ascending and descending of a set of steps of the ‘bass’ dancers, and as
each instrument comes to the fore the choreography determines that the
com m ensurate group of dancers is either foregrounded or highlighted by the
selection of camera shot, until all move in unison at the end. The mirroring is not
absolutely precise, and the characterization of each instrument (the drums as
bandaged mummies, the synthesizer as women in sequinned bathing suits and
caps) is clearly an invention, increasing points of relation, rather than a replication,

1 ~ Barthes, R., 'The Rhetoric of the Image,' in Image-Music-Text, p. 49. N.B. Barthes’ use
of gesture’ here is different to my own usage.
115 Kershaw, D , Music and Image on Film and Video: An Absolute Alternative,’ in The
Companion to Contemporary Musical Thought, ed. Paynter, J., et al, (Routledge, London
and New York, 199?), p 497.
 100

but the degree of similarity is sufficient to produce an overlap of gestural mode.

The interaction of musical elements being recreated in the interaction of dancers
allow s one to appreciate similarity and difference of gesture across modes of
perception as well as within them.
Indeed, in a Lebenswelt constituted by overlapping gestures, the very
notion of what is ‘com posite’ becomes rather suspect. As W ittgenstein outlines in
Philosophical Investigations (§§47-8), the idea of what is composite is determined
by the register at which one observes, the language-game that is in use at the
tim e Com posite’ is always a relative term, since any object is composite at some
level, right down to and including elementary particles. Identifying what is
com posite eventually comes down to clarifying what sort of practice one is
engaged in.
The description of music video as being a composite art now becomes a
rather less important aspect of how one approaches it, since both image track and
sound track might equally be regarded as being composite themselves, and the
video as a whole is one part of the composite that is the culture in which it is
experienced. As Stan Hawkins reminds us, perception does not stop at the edges
of the screen: 'The viewer’s sense of imagination soon exceeds the boundaries of
the visual image. In other words, the sense of perception becomes altered through
visual images in a manner that shapes, enhances and even detracts from our
experience of the music on its own.’116 Sound and image may be recognizable as
distinct types of gesture, and normal analytic practice would be to make that
distinction, but that does not of itself prevent effective and valid comparisons
between the two being made, indeed, the complementation of their qualities upon
one another might be said to demand this. The gestures of the one may or may
not resonate with some, all or none of the other, and within themselves, for it
should be stressed that the act of comparison need not be focussed solely upon
resemblance: for two gestures to resonate, or ‘sound well' together as chords’ (to
borrow Schoenberg s model for Die gluckliche Hand) they need not be the same,
indeed, it is preferable if they are not. Better that they are in proportion, or play off
one another. For example, the video to Robbie W illiam s’s ‘Let Love be Your
Energy’ is characterized by an animated W illiams running through a series of

116 Hawkins, S., ‘Perspectives in Popular Musicology,’ in Popular Music 15, (1996), p. 32.
 101

landscapes. At no point does the rhythm of his running equate to the underlying
rhythm of the music, but for a short time (approximately twenty seconds) while he
runs across a shining sea at a slightly higher rate, there is a relation between his
running rate (around 233 beats per minute) and the beat of the music (exactly 89
beats per minute) that has an almost magical effect. To ask whether this is due
solely to their relative proportions (which is incidentally that of a doubled Golden
Section proportion, insofar as both are Fibonacci numbers and have a Golden
Section relation to the intermediate Fibonacci number 144),11/ or to its relation to
w hat has gone before, or the way the celebratory brassy fanfares of the chorus
echo the glinting of light on the water, is to ask the wrong question. It is of course
due to all of these things in part, some more than others, and many more besides,
but suffice to say it is not because they are ‘the sam e.’ Plato describes a similar
process, noting ‘the various bodies part or come together in the course of mutual
interchanges of position and what seems like magic is due to the complication of
th e ir effects on each other.’118
And where there are similarities, or isomorphisms, these need not mean an
equivalence of identity. One might compare the phenomenon of sympathetic
resonance in strings, where the upper partials of a sound will provoke a response
on strings of a certain proportional relation, with a different pitch to the original, and
given sufficient strength of input this would in turn produce its own upper partials,
so that a system of great complexity can be generated from simple rules. This
tendency of simple inputs to generate complex outcomes, such that similarities
m ight be observed across the system in differing registers, without compromising
the specificity of the part or the diversity of the system as a whole, is described by
the mathematics of chaos theory, and based upon the idea of the fractal. Fractal
mathematics can be observed in a range of apparently random phenomena: cloud
form ation, air turbulence, or crystal growth, to pick up Varese’s analogy. It can

117 For a detailed discussion of Golden Section proportions as they might be related to
music, see Lendvai, E., B6la Bartdk: An Analysis of his Music, (Kahn & Averill, London,
1971).
118 Plato, ibid., 80, pp 107-8.
 102

also be seen in music analysis,119 and in the technology used to com press and
store digital images. In terms of analysis, this m eans that two very different
gestures may have an underlying similarity that is difficult to discern, and also that
com bining even two very simple gestures can produce a chain that resembles
neither. To say that the world is a complex place is not to say much, but it does
dem onstrate that any attempt to analyse a music video would barely touch the
surface of what it might offer, and also that to concentrate on identifying the
sim ila r’ would be likely to miss even that limited target.

It is not idle bickering to argue emphatically against the concept o f "representation,”

since from this concept have arisen the most serious errors in the aesthetics of music.
To “represent" something always involves the notion of two separate, dissimilar things,
of which one must be intentionally related to the other through a particular mental
act.120

W here meaning seeks to reduce the object, to translate it, represent it, and efface
its m ateriality in favour of the ideal, gesture is its antithesis, pluralizing, opening the
object out onto the world. Meaning fixes the khoros of gesture, geometricizes its
oscillations: ‘here would be instituted against music (against the text),
representation.’121 In an essay on Bertolt Brecht, Barthes writes, ‘One of the tasks
of a critical age is precisely to pluralize the object, to separate pleasure from the
sign; we must de-semanticize the object (which does not mean de-symbolize it),

119 See Madden, C., Fractals in Music: Introductory Mathematics for Musical Analysis,
(High Art Press, Salt Lake City, 1999), and also a rather more poetic account in Adams, D.,
op. cit., pp. 144-7.
120
Hanslick, E., op. cit., p. xxii.
121 Barthes, R , ‘Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein,’ in The Responsibility of Forms, p. 89.
 103

give the sign a shock: let the sign fall, like a shed skin.’122 And it is Brecht that
seeks to make a synthesis of these opposites, in the concept of the social gestus.
‘a gesture, or set of gestures, in which can be read a whole social situation.’123
Brecht resisted the totalized meaning - his plays are not constructed with a final,
single moral in mind, to be reified and taken home. His plays are active, the
gesture is given to be taken up and used, but he remains committed to meanings,
an engagement with the social order made on the terms of that society. The
Brechtian gesture, gestus, is extracted from its aesthetic bodily origin, and
‘prom oted’ to the standing of reason by virtue of its capacity for meaning. The
gesture, insofar as it is an entity of perception, is always already socialized, but it
m aintains a certain stubborn materiality, signifiance, at work on the social, undoing
it. The gestus has already abandoned this process in favour of meaning, and no
sooner has it done this than it has become re-presentation, divorced from its
materiality. In Kristevan terms, it has privileged phenotext at the expense of
genotext.
And this process will recur every time there is a search for meaning: Small
notes that ‘the convention of the concert hall denies them [musicians] any
expressive use of bodily gesture, confining them to gestures in sound that are
m ade through their instruments. The art of representation has alienated itself
com pletely from the human body and its gestures.’124 Small has partially
recognized the problem; what he describes is in large part the phenotext of a
performance, but he seems so intent on uncovering the m eanings of the
relationships a performance sets up, the non-meaning aspects of sound that have
a more directly somatic appeal, the genotext, in short, (although this rather
oversim plifies Kristeva’s categories), has been overlooked. He is by no means
alone in this intent: Adorno is not only concerned with eliciting meaning, but is
positively hostile to anything that might cloud this. ‘Many of the cultural products
bearing the anti-commercial trademark “art for art’s sake” show traces of

122 Barthes, R., ‘Brecht and Discourse: A Contribution to the Study of Discursivity,’ in The
Rustle of Language, trans. Howard, R., (University of California Press, Berkeley and Los
Angeles, 1989), p. 222.
12‘ Barthes, R., ‘Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein,’ op. cit., p. 93.
12* Small, C., op. cit., p. 155.
 104

com mercialism in their appeal to the sensational or in the conspicuous display of

m aterial wealth and sensuous stimuli at the expense of the m eaningfulness of the
w o rk.’125 Astute as Adorno may be on the circum stances surrounding the rise of
the slogan ‘art for art’s sake,’ one might suspect that he has fallen prey to what
Benjamin notes as T h e obligatory misunderstanding of I ’art p o u r I’art. For art’s
sake was scarcely ever to be taken literally; it was almost always a flag under
which sailed a cargo that could not be declared because it still lacked a nam e.’126
A d orn o’s requirement of ‘meaningfulness' from the art object becomes paradoxical
for a Marxist critic after Kristeva’s suggestion that ‘communication is
m erchandise,''127 an idea also implicit in W ittgenstein’s assertion that meaning is
com mensurate with use.
How, then, is one to ‘escape the tyranny of m eaning,’128 where are the lines
of flight? It is worth contrasting the notion of ‘the social’ with that of ‘the collective.’
If the social is the site of meaning, status quo, what Freud termed the ‘Superego,’
the collective is the social made aware of its non-meaning, material aspect: a
Bakhtinian carnivalesque entity. W here the gestus of Brecht is socialized
throughout, the collective ‘gesture’ retains some of its affective charge, remains
unfixed, as khoros. The very idea of a stimulus acting directly upon the body
demands a response that is by its very nature collective, which itself takes the form
of movement, of gesture. It is in no sense coincidental that the notion of the
chorus in Greek tragedy is etymologically bound to khoros, movement. The
chorus is the human collectivity confronting the event and seeking to understand
it.’129 It stood as a bulwark against the intrusion of ‘meaning’ into the form of the
tragedy, giving a physical response to the physical challenges posed by the Fates.
Barthes notes:

125 Adorno, T W , 'How to Look at Television,’ in The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on
Mass Culture, ed. Bernstein, J.M., (Routledge, London, 1991), p. 137.
126 Benjamin, W., 'Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia,' in
Reflections, trans. Jephcott, E., (Schocken, New York, 1986), pp. 183-4.
127 Barthes, R., ‘Kristeva’s Semieotike,' in The Rustle of Language, trans. Howard, R.,
(University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1989), p. 170.
128 Barthes, R., The Grain of the Voice,’ in Image-Music-Text, p. 185.
129 Barthes, R , The Greek Theatre,’ in The Responsibility of Forms, p. 82.
 105

As the interrogation shifts to increasingly intellectual forms, tragedy evolves toward

what we today call drama, even bourgeois comedy, based on conflicts of characters,
not on conflicts of fate. And what marks this change of function is specifically the
gradual atrophying of the interrogative element, i.e., of the chorus.130

In the face of drama and of narrative, individuals placed in meaningful relation to

one another, there is no longer a place for the chorus, for collectivity. To narrate is
to situate the characters, to map out and fix the relations between dramatic
protagonists. But where there is only pseudo-narrative, in profoundly non-dramatic
scenarios, in short, in music video, there the role of collectivity might flourish. The
em phasis music videos place upon the scene, the resonant image or ‘pregnant
m om ent,’ demands a collective response. Music video’s refusal to posit a single
meaning, to ‘fix’ itself so as to become a representation, marks it as text rather
than object. The only other form that the music video could be compared to is the
channel ident,’ which has a similar striking-yet-enigmatic character that refuses to
volunteer a meaning of its own. Both might be described as culturally parasitic,
since they are dependent upon a process of association, based on gestural
comparison, for releasing any kind of meaning, which is in any case always plural.
Music video generates not a meaning but a process, a space that the perceiver
m ight enter into to make meaning, or simply revel in material sensation.
In his critique of Wagner, Adorno recognized that the revolutionary claims
of the W agnerian Gesamtkunstwerk were an impossibility, by trying to embody the
collective whilst being founded upon the ‘genius’ of a bourgeois individual.131
Music video is not a Gesamtkunstwerk in this sense of the term, but it may not be
so far from W agner’s stated ideals, as expressed when he wrote: ‘No-one can be
better aware than myself, that the realization of this [music] drama depends on
conditions which do not lie within the will, nay, not even the capability of the single
individual - were this capability infinitely greater than my own - but only in
community, and in a mutual cooperation made possible thereby.’132 In resisting the
unity of meaning and representation, and remaining unfinished, processual, and

130 Ibid., pp. 68-9.

31 Adorno, T.W., In Search of Wagner, pp. 110ff.
32 Wagner, R., quoted in Adorno, T.W., ibid., p. 113.
 106

stubbornly material, the music video allows for the possibility of seeing beyond the
social and enabling ‘the very transcendence of egotism .’133 The aim of an
aesthetics of music video ‘is no longer the platitudinous one of Beauty: it is
festivity.’134

133 Barthes, R., ‘One Always Fails in Speaking of What One loves,’ in The Rustle of
Language, p. 305.
134 Ibid., p. 304.
 The Technological Body

c. 375 B.C., Athens

This is the kind of lawlessness that easily insinuates itself unobserved [through music]
... because it is supposed to be only a form of play and to work no harm. Nor does it
work any, except that by gradual infiltration it softly overflows upon the characters and
pursuits of men and from these issues forth grown greater to attack their business
dealings, and from these relations it proceeds against the laws and the constitution
with wanton license until it finally overthrows all things public and private. ... For the
modes of music are never disturbed without unsettling of the most fundamental political
and social conventions.1

The notion of aesthetics as a separate discipline, distinct from philosophy as a

whole only took place in 1750 with the publication of Alexander Baum garten’s
Aesthetics, and one senses in Immanuel Kant’s ‘rigorous demarcation of aesthetic
judgem ent from the cognitive, political and ethical realms’2 a few years later, the
promotion of an ideological agenda as much as the genuine idea of an entirely
new field of thought. Although aesthetics was supposed to circumvent questions
of ethics and politics by focussing upon the point of sensation, prior to this the (as
yet undefined) field of aesthetics, and music aesthetics in particular, were

1 Plato, The Republic, trans. Shores, P., Loeb Classical Library, (Putnam’s, New York,
1930), quoted in Attali, J., Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Massumi, B ,
(Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1985), pp. 33-4.
2 Eagleton, T., The Ideology of the Aesthetic, p. 9.
 108

inextricably bound to their socio-ethical import. In the time of Plato, aisthetikos

could not be considered apart from ethikos. (The same is increasingly true today
also; witness Simon Frith’s assertion that ‘aesthetic response is, by its nature, an
ethical agreem ent.’3) The power that Plato ascribes to music in The Republic and
elsewhere, as having the capacity to either mould the model citizen, or else, as
with those who dance to the Phrygian mode, releasing what is lowest and wildest
in their nature,’4 is one that is intimately connected with the social order. The
process of social engineering through sound is to take place in conjunction with
gymnastics, not because m ousike is good for the soul, physical exercise for the
body, as most people imagine, but because these two aspects of education are
com plementary and mutually corrective.’5 Thus for Plato the establishment or
disestablishm ent of social order takes place through music (and physical training)
in a way that is inextricable from its affective qualities, or as Adorno put it, ‘Music
represents at once the immediate manifestation of impulse and the locus of its
tam ing.'6
The idea that music is doubly inscribed, at once enacting (and producing)
the social order from which it emanates and simultaneously prefiguring the
idealized model of a ‘society yet to com e,’ embodying a set of relationships other
than those it partakes in, is a fruitful one. W hat for Plato was a relatively
straightforward proscriptive distinction between ‘good’ modes and bad’ modes of
music, however, is now understood as a much more complicated set of dialectical
relations between music and society. Frith neatly articulates this tension, writing:

3 Frith, S., Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music, (Oxford University Press,
Oxford, 1996), p. 272.
4 Scruton, R , The Aesthetics of Music, (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1997), p. 390.
5 Abrahams, G., The Concise Oxford History of Music, (Oxford University Press, Oxford,
1979), p. 32, although Abrahams is closely paraphrasing a passage from Plato’s Republic,
see Strunk, O. (ed), Source Readings in Music History: Antiquity and The Middle Ages,
(W W. Norton & Company, New York and London, 1950), p. 12.
6 Adorno, T.W., ‘On the fetish character in music and the regression of listening,’ in The
Culture Industry, ed. Bernstein, J.M., (Routledge, London, 1991), p 26.
 109

What music does (all music) is put into play a sense of identity that may or may not fit
the way we are placed by other social forces. Music certainly puts us in our place, but
it can also suggest that our social circumstances are not immutable. . .. It may be that,
in the end, I want to value most highly that music, popular and serious, which has
some sort of disruptive cultural effect, but my argument is that music only does this
through its impact on individuals, and that this impact is obdurately social.7

The idea that music can both be form ed by society and actively construct collective
identity in the same instant is what makes its social status such a thorny problem,
or a revolutionary potential, depending upon one’s approach. The complexity of
the problem is doubled in relation to music video, not least because it involves a
combination of music, seen as a collectivizing force, and television, which is
typically regarded as a dividing, individuating medium. However, as with Frith's
good’ music, the primary impulse upon seeing a particularly striking and enigmatic
music video is a social one; as with Frith’s aesthetic response to hearing a
favourite track on the radio in a hotel room, ‘I wish there were someone to play this
to .’8 My desire to discuss the music video with others, to clarify its status, to make
meaning, is perhaps evidence of Andrew G oodwin’s premise that music video is
‘the m aking m usical of the television im age,’ such that Television is m usiced.’9
(Or one might say, after Chris Small, television is ‘m usicked.’) In return, music
video may lay bare certain aspects of popular music, either directly, or indirectly by
deliberate omission of the expected, making explicit the social qualities implicit in
music. One might cite the instance of The W iseguys’ ‘Start the Com m otion’ as a
particularly clear example of this reciprocity. Like much modern dance music it is
constructed through the principle of ‘sam pling’ older records, and this track is
made almost entirely from scraps of preexisting musical material that are cut up,
looped and repeated. The video is similarly constructed from a set of fourteen
fragm ents of performance footage (one for each auditory source plus footage of a
DJ, one of The Wiseguys), all filmed separately on the same set and then intercut
to match the music, or to preempt and cue a sam ple’s ‘entrance,’ but always paced

7 Frith, S., Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music, pp. 276-7.
8 Ibid., p. 278.
9 Goodwin, A., Dancing in the Distraction Factory: Music Television and Popular Music, p.
70.
 110

in such a way as to reinforce the rhythm of the track. Although each of these
fragm entary perform ances’ take place against the same sparse backdrop, all are
costum ed appropriately, with the dress, hairstyles, and gestural m annerisms that
one might expect of the tim e period and genre of the musical samples. Thus the
folk-style flute sample is ‘played’ by a long-haired, corduroy-clad ‘folkie,’ perched
on a high stool, whilst the rock guitar and drum sound that underpins the track is
perform ed’ by a Rolling Stones-style four piece band, complete with a strutting,
pouting singer. The only two performers in contemporary apparel are the rapper
that presents the bulk of what are presumably new (with the track) lyrics, although
his performance is visually ‘sam pled’ in the same way as the other musical
elements, and the DJ, seen leafing through records before a single Dansette-type
turntable. Although the DJ-creator of the track does not produce any of the sonic
material himself, his role as composer (literally) of the track is being deliberately
presented in the image track, despite the fact that there is no ‘perform ance’ as
such to show. (This Hitchcock-like presence of non- performing' DJ composers is
quite common in dance tracks; witness the peripheral presence of both the
Chemical Brothers and Fat Boy Slim, on T-shirts, paintings, or as ‘extras' in many
o f their videos.)
The video to ‘Start the Com m otion’ makes overt the latent (social) content
of the music track, its historical points of reference and its means of production, but
one performs this connection of music to its so-called ‘extra-m usical’ meaning at a
subconscious (if not unconscious) level every time one listens to any piece of
music. An educated listener (and by educated I simply mean socially practised, a
form of life, rather than trained) is capable of making these associations, Peircean
indexical relationships, almost instantaneously. The principle is illustrated in an
obvious way in this music video by doubling up the ‘social content’ of the music in
the image to a large extent, (although not completely: there are subtle
connotations to the setting, facial expressions, and a myriad of others not
immediately present in the sound, and vice versa - as Cook puts it, neither
exhausts the signification of the other). But the same forces are at work, in either
a complementary or dialectical relationship, in every music video. And the binding
of image, a much more clearly socialized medium insofar as it is based upon the
notion of representation, with the potentially socially disruptive music is to raise the
stakes somewhat, perhaps even to demand a Kristevan sem analysis’ that would
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mean the interrogation of the fundam ental matrix of our civilization grasped in its
ideological, neuralgic locus.’10 Certainly when she writes ‘sem analysis needs to
provide itself with a specific object which the traditional modes of analysis are
incapable of grasping in all its specificity,’11 she might as easily be talking of music
videos rather than the poetic texts to which she devotes her attention. Indeed,
Kristeva identifies the im portance of the ‘poetic musicality found in “sym bolist’’
poetry and in M allarm e,’12 and also suggests that through ‘m usicality’ ‘Logical
syntheses and all ideologies are ... displaced toward something that is no longer
within the realm of the idea, sign, syntax, and thus Logos, but is instead simply
sem iotic functioning.’13 Kristeva does not follow up these suggestive statements
with specific reference to music, but I believe it would be fair to state that music
video does involve a calling into question of the Stoic sign, which is Kristeva’s
stated aim for ‘sem analysis.’
Before continuing, it is worth outlining a few distinctions that are required in
a discussion of ‘the social’ so as to prevent confusion, namely distinguishing
precisely what is meant by the concepts of ‘the individual’ and 'the social,’ and
differentiating between ‘the social’ and ‘the collective,’ a distinction which Frith
(amongst others) fails to make, or at least make explicit. The category of the
social’ is a difficult one either to embrace or reject entirely, particularly for those of
a le ftis t’ persuasion (so far as this is still a useful positional term). For while on the
one hand there are those who would wish to rescue ‘society’ from the wastebasket
of history that it was thrown towards by Margaret Thatcher’s now infamous
proclamation that ‘There is no such thing as society,’ it is difficult at the same time
to argue in favour of the heavy handed wielding of state power that is implied in the
term ‘social order.’ The valorization of the individual in modern W estern thought,
often under the rubric of democracy, has been driven in recent times from two
independent sources almost simultaneously, both in opposition to these differing
conceptions of ‘society:’ namely in a ‘freeing’ of the self from an oppressive social
order’ as a strain of the 1960s counterculture, and also in the withdrawal of the

10 Kristeva, J., The Semiotic Activity,’ Screen, 14, (1973), p. 34.

11 Ibid., p. 38.
12 Kristeva, J., Revolution in Poetic Language, p. 153.
13 Ibid., p. 63.
 112

individual from social responsibility in late-1970s free m arketeering, or

m onetarism .'14 Thus, the notion of ‘the individual’ became a catch-all term that
acted as a lightning rod to a range of ideas united in their opposition to varying
concepts of ‘the social,’ even though they were themselves often in opposition to
one another. Although both hippies and Thatcherites set them selves against
society and the state in the name of freedom, in each case their conception of the
role and extent of society was distinct: the state power that constituted ‘social
order’ was understood as an oppressive, or better, repressive force, functioning
like a Freudian paternal ‘Superego,’ and indeed the Freud family was closely
involved with both the British and American governments and corporations for a
time before and especially after W orld W ar II. The state conceived of as an
expression of society from the ‘bottom up,’ and seen by Thatcherites to infringe
individual freedoms, and more particularly individual capital, bore little
resemblance to the understanding of the 1960s counterculture, besides a general
idea of an impersonal bureaucracy, but an unholy alliance between the two
heralded the triumph of a form of individualism and a consequent decline in the
status of the communal, the public. One might compare Benjamin's observation
that ‘the masses are brought face to face with them selves,’15 in the newsreels of
the 1930s with the contemporary fixation with individuated personalities on ‘reality’
shows such as ‘Big Brother’ on television. It is because both the ‘top down' and
the ‘bottom up’ models fall under the term ‘the social’ that so much confusion
arises, particularly in relation to the contradictory powers of music - one might
compare Plato’s ‘good’ modes to the ‘top down’ model of the social, and the
disruptive modes such as the Phrygian to the ‘bottom up’ model. If one now
divides ‘the social' into two distinct terms reflecting these two distinct models
(regardless of their inevitable overlap in practice), into a top down ‘social ordering,’
and a bottom up ‘collective,’ a better understanding of these contradictory strains

14 These ideas were explored in much greater depth in the BBC television series ‘Century
of the Self,’ broadcast in the Winter and Spring of 2002. The following discussion draws in
part on these programmes.
15 Benjamin, W., The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’ in Illuminations,
ed. Arendt, H., trans. Zohn, H., (Fontana, London, 1973), p. 243n.21.
 113

in music becomes available. Thus the individualism of the 1960s opposed social
ordering,’ whereas Thatcherite individualism was set against ‘the collective.’
Freudian theory suggested that social ordering was both necessary and
desirable, repressing the base motives of the collective ‘id,’ or ‘the m ob’ as it could
equally be termed, in order to function in any kind of society (hence, Civilization
and its Discontents). (It is interesting to note that the word ‘m ob’ is derived from the
Latin m obile, and semantically close to the Greek khoros.) Followers of Wilhelm
Reich, a student of Freud’s who rejected this idea, including A dorno’s
contem porary Herbert Marcuse, fam ously pronounced T he re is a policeman in our
heads; he must be destroyed.’ However, the atomized individuals produced by
this form of psychoanalysis lacked any kind of coherent political agency; as the
Black Panther group realized when they were invited to participate at this school,
as soon as one renounced collective identity, one lost the political power that the
collective could call upon. Since the collective is not an object but a set of
relations between individuals, it has a far greater resistive capacity to social control
than any one individual, no matter how liberated. Conversely, however, a
communal identity is difficult to direct, and thus liable to favour the status quo, but
it does at least have the potential to challenge. The answer was not to destroy the
policeman in our heads,’ but collectively to take control of it and restrict and
redirect the power it held over the individual.
In this bifurcated vision of society, 'social reality,’ that is, the everyday
circumstances of people, occurs at the interface of collective will, such as it is, and
state power/social ordering (and by ‘state’ I shorthand both government, nominally
itself an expression of collective will in a democracy, and also a range of non­
governmental corporate interests - what was once known as the ‘military-industrial
com plex’), so that in the absence of any collective will expressed in the notion of
‘the public’ there is only state power, and a utopia would be a destruction of the
state, leaving only collective will in genuine and total consensus. Thus any attempt
to produce an effect upon social reality must involve a stimulation of collective
conscience, and here can be seen why Plato credited music, rather than any other
art form, with the power to either support or destroy the social order. Music has
the capacity to short circuit the officially sanctioned practices of aesthetic
understanding, to bypass representation and translation into an ideal. As Frith
puts it, ‘Music can stand for, symbolize and offer the immediate experience of
 114

collective identity. Other cultural form s - painting, literature, design - can

articulate and show off shared values and pride, but only music can make you feel
them .’16 The idea of music appealing directly to the nervous system, the waves of
sound impacting upon the body as a purely somatic phenomenon, as with
Nietzsche’s ‘physiological objections’1' to the music of Wagner, which caused his
stomach to protest’ and his heart and bowels to ‘fret,’ is one illustrated in the video
to Fat Boy Slim s Ya M am a.’ Here a tape of the track causes uncontrollable
physical movement in the listener, an experience which people pay for via access
to headphones. W hen the music is ‘set free,’ broadcast on normal speakers,
social chaos results, and the police move in to put a stop to it and arrest those
responsible. Comparisons between this video and the early ‘Acid House’
m ovem ent in the late 1980s are irresistible. W hen the holding of outdoor ‘raves’
began to attract groups of upwards of ten thousand people together in the summer
of 1988, dubbed at the time a second ‘sum mer of love’ (after the late 1960s), there
was a deliberate cultivation of a sense of communality through the new form of
house’ music and its attendant culture, ‘One Nation Under a G roove,’ as a record
of the time put it. Presented with large numbers of people basically dancing in a
field, the response of the Conservative government was astonishing in its scope,
swiftly passing draconian legislation as part of the Criminal Justice Act that
prohibited the outdoor playing of music 'wholly or predominantly characterized by
repetitive beats’ to even small groups of people. Large numbers of police were
deployed to first force raves into indoor spaces such as warehouses, and then
close them down altogether. Although undoubtedly a great inconvenience to the
inhabitants of whichever rural community these raves might gather near to, the
swiftness and scale with which the government cracked down on any uncontrolled
musical gathering was educational. The social consequences of even a relatively
small collective musical conscience forming outside established channels of

16 Frith, S., Towards an aesthetic of popular music,’ in Leppert, R. and McClary, S. (eds),
Music and Society the politics of composition, performance and reception, (Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge, 1987), p. 140.
17 Nietzsche, F., ‘Nietzsche contra Wagner: The Brief of a Psychologist,’ in The Works of
Friedrich Nietzsche: vol. Ill, trans. Common, T., (T. Fisher Unwin, London, 1899), p. 69.
 115

com merce (represented by the ‘superclubs’ that form ed in the wake of this) was
not something the state was prepared to sanction.
If music and music video then have this charge, this social power, can
anyone explain why 'Top of the Pops’ doesn’t bring people out onto the streets, or
why one’s local branch of HMV isn’t a hotbed of revolutionary fervour? The
absurdity of the question is ample proof that one can easily overestimate the
oppositional power of the collective, inclined as it is to reflect the status quo rather
than rise up against it in a politically engaged way, but it is also a reminder that
m usic is in no sense independent of social reality even while it may articulate an
alternative to that reality. ‘Short-circuiting’ the straightforwardly representative
artistic model of social reality does not necessarily evade the influence of the
social entirely. This is of course the birthplace of critical musicology, and more
particularly of the dialectical approach of Theodor Adorno. In A dorno’s aesthetic
theory it is the very capacity of music to speak outside of the social that enables its
relation to the social to be stated: ‘W orks of art - like all precipitates of the
objective spirit - are the object itself. They are the concealed social essence
quoted as the phenomenon. ... While works of art hardly ever attempt to imitate
society and their creators need know nothing of it, the gestures of the works of art
are objective answers to objective questions.’18 It is not the case that one simply
recognizes a replication of the social order in music, but a question of absence, of
what the music is not, and can not be, that enables critical reception and Adorno’s
‘negative dialectics.’ As Max Paddison puts it: T h e relationship between the social
totality and the “autonomous” realm of art is thus misrepresented if reduced to any
crude form of reflectionist theory, or to functionalism. The emphasis is rather on
m ediation,’19 The intensely dialectical nature of Adorno’s method of argument
frequently resembles the actions of a tightrope walker, constantly checking himself
and often giving the impression of self-contradiction: his attitude towards the
relation of the individual to the collective is especially contorted, as when he writes
In music, too, collective powers are liquidating an individuality past saving, but

18 Adorno, T.W., Philosophy of Modern Music, trans. Mitchell, A.G. and Blomster, W.V.,
(Sheed & Ward, London, 1973), pp 131-2.
19 Paddison, M., Adorno, Modernism and Mass Culture: Essays on Critical Theory and
Music, (Kahn & Averill, London, 1996), p. 49.
 116

against them only individuals are capable of consciously representing the aims of
the collectivity.’20 At other times, as in his writing on Stravinsky, the collective is at
once an attack upon 'comfortable conformity with individualistic society,’21 and also
akin to a Freudian mob. W hat remains constant, however, is his com mitm ent to a
form of aesthetic engagement dependent upon the location and critique of musical
m eaning,’ to which end was developed his technique of ‘immanent analysis.’ The
problem atic character of Adorno’s ‘musical m aterial,’ as identified by Carl
Dahlhaus, is discussed by Paddison elsewhere,22 and there is little point in
replicating his arguments here, but the very real achievement of Adorno here is to
transpose the straightforward ‘w hat’ question of meaning into a ‘how’ question, an
analysis of productive forces, a dialectical process that marks the dissolution of the
distinction between ‘m usical’ and ‘extra-m usical.’ ‘The rudiments of external
meanings are the irreducibly non-artistic elements in art. Its formal principle lies
not in them, but in the dialectic of both moments - which accomplishes the
transform ation of meanings within it.’23 Despite his many disagreements with
popular musicologists, it is this insight, which underpins his critical project, that has
been fundamental to a large part of recent musicology, and provided it with a
critical edge that might otherwise have been lacking. Artistic endeavour is not
merely a resultant of social order, but is also formative in one’s experience of that
order, in an ongoing dialectic with the consumer of that art. As Adorno wrote in a
criticism of Benjamin’s work on Baudelaire, T h e fetish character of the commodity
is not a fact of consciousness; rather it is dialectical, in the eminent sense that it
produces consciousness.’24

20 Adorno, T.W., ‘On the fetish character in music and the regression in listening,' op. cit.,
p. 52.
21 Adorno, T.W., Philosophy of Modern Music, p. 159. See the entire section Identification
with the Collective.’
22 Paddison, M., Adorno, Modernism and Mass Culture, pp 117-24, and also in the same
author’s Adorno's Aesthetics of Music, (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1993).
23 Adorno, T.W., ‘Commitment,’ trans. McDonagh, F., in Aesthetics and Politics, (Verso,
London and New York, 1980), p. 178.
24 Adorno, T.W., ‘Letters to Walter Benjamin,’ trans. Zohn , H., in Aesthetics and Politics, p.
111 .
 117

Given all of this, it becomes difficult to reconcile this analytic technique with
his repeated insistence upon the complete and finished work of art’ as product
rather than continuing process, the very idea that there might be such a thing as a
separating out of the ‘message in a bottle’ and its instance of reception. The
objectivity of art lies in the fixation of such moments. W orks of art are sim ilar to
those childish grim aces which the striking of the clock causes to become
permanently fixed.’25 A dorno’s dialectic only works in one direction - all work is
done in artistic production, what Nattiez terms poiesis. The object may be
form ative of the subject, but only the social com poser-artist as subject is involved
in the production of art-as-product. It is this belief in the fundamental passivity of
the audience at the moment of reception that is the greatest flaw in Adorno’s
thought (at least with regard to popular m usic26), most evident in his undervaluing
of the impact of sensory perception and the difficulty of relating his theory to the
som atic realm. His critique of Stravinsky in the Philosophy o f Modern Music27 is
based almost entirely on the charge of a reification of sound material and its
withdrawal from the dialectic, which is based in turn upon a questionable notion of
the body in music (a notion which is by no means restricted to Adorno).
One can detect two rather different approaches to the issue of the body in
m usic in Adorno's writings, in his earlier discussions of mass culture, and in his
approach to Stravinsky respectively. The writings on mass culture are potentially
more optimistic, insofar as this can ever be said of Adorno, for although he seems
to repress the issue of the body, to avoid discussing it at all, when it does briefly
appear it resembles the physiological site of resistance one encounters relatively
frequently in writing on popular music. In his essay ‘On the fetish character in
music and the regression in listening’ he pointedly distinguishes between the
‘m endacity’ of aesthetic pleasure, and physical response (which is theoretically

25 Adorno, T.W., Philosophy of Modern Music, p. 132. Adorno was so fond of this analogy
that he reused it in The Schema of Mass Culture,’ op. cit., p. 82.
26 For more detail on this point, and on the connection of this to Adorno’s reaction to
fascism see Middleton, R., Studying Popular Music, (Open University Press, Milton Keynes
and Philadelphia, 1990), pp. 34-63.
27 A better translation would be Philosophy of New Music, as Paddison chooses to call it,
but I have retained the title as translated in the English edition throughout for the sake of
consistency.
 118

tenable if hermeneutically questionable) in stating: ‘Enjoym ent still retains a place

only in the immediate bodily presence,’28 a striking phrase to which he makes no
further reference. Later writings on jazz simply disavow any connection with bodily
sensation: When people dance to jazz for example, they do not dance for
sensuous pleasure or in order to obtain release. Rather they merely depict the
gestures of sensuous human beings.’29 Implicit in this argument is the notion that
were people to dance for 'sensuous pleasure’ alone, then jazz might harbour some
critical potential, which is not a state of affairs that Adorno’s polemic against ‘light
m usic’ is likely to countenance.
The suggestion that within some of A dorno’s work might be embedded an
uncritical notion of the body in music is surprising, but it is certainly not the case in
his Philosophy o f Modem Music. The basis of Adorno’s critique of Stravinsky’s
music is his assertion that, unlike Schonberg, Stravinsky hypostatizes his material,
refuses to engage with the dialectic of the social through musical form, and the
consequent attaining of a ‘false authenticity.'

It is a matter of the chimerical rebellion of culture against its own essence as culture.
Stravinsky undertakes such a rebellion not only in the familiar aesthetic game with
barbarism [in Le Sacre du Printemps], but furthermore in the fierce suspension of that
element in music which is called culture — the suspension, that is, of the humanly
eloquent work of art. ... He is attracted to that sphere in which meaning has become so
ritualized that it cannot be experienced as the specific meaning of the musical act.30

Adorno’s analysis of Stravinsky’s music is very often highly accurate - his relation
to the history of W estern art music, his treatment of musical material and harmony,
the ‘spatialization’ of time, all of which infuriate Adorno - but his conclusions are
flawed, because of the way in which he regards the body, and disregards Nattiez’s
‘aesthesic realm.’ Adorno recognizes that there is little to be gained from the
'immediate bodily presence’ of ‘On the fetish character,’ but fails to see that the

28 Adorno, T.W., ‘On the fetish character in music and the regression in listening,’ op. cit.,
p. 29.
29 Adorno, T.W., The schema of mass culture,’ in The Culture Industry, p. 82.
30
Adorno, T.W., Philosophy of Modern Music, p. 140.
 119

problem is not ‘bodily presence’ p e rs e , but conceiving of it as being im m ediate,’

and this stems from his extreme pessimism, or perhaps condescension. In either
case it results in his refusal to countenance the subject m aking meaning, and more
im portantly the sense of an ongoing process in the act of making itself.
Remarkably he actually perceives the playing out of this issue in Stravinsky,
noting: T h e goal of musical effects is no longer stimulation [of the psyche], but
rather the “doing.” ... In the em ancipation from the meaning of the whole, the
effects assume a physically material character, becoming evident and almost
athletic.’31 One might say that musical effect has in Stravinsky become plain
affect. Adorno does not believe that this emancipation from meaning, from end
product, might be liberating or have resistive capabilities because he is unable to
conceive of the body as being an active participant in any way. As far as Adorno is
concerned, in Stravinsky ‘the product is nothing subjectively produced, thus
reflecting the human being, but rather something which exists per se.'32 The
Adornian body of Philosophy o f Modern Music is in a direct line from the Cartesian
(as opposed to the Deleuzean) body-as-machine. T h e body is treated by this
m usic as a means - an object which reacts precisely, it drives the body to its
highest attainm ents.’33 The dialectic of subject and object, so crucial to all of
Adorno's writing, is abandoned in an apparent moment of reification, a denial of
the productive potency of the human body. The end point of A dorno’s thought is
that Stravinsky's music, and popular music in general, ‘arous[es] only bodily
animation instead of offering m eaning,’34 as though these were two different and
separable things.

31 Ibid , p. 173.
32 Ibid., pp 173-4.
33 Ibid., p. 173.
34 Ibid., p. 140.
 120

II

A d o rn o ’s theories are both a challenge and a store of great promise: much of his
despair with regard to mass culture and its reception is entirely understandable
w hen viewed in the context of rising fascism in which it was written (even if his
refusal to readdress these issues in the 1960s is less so), yet the toolkit he has
furnished the critical musicologist with is invaluable. Perhaps the greatest
disappointm ent, however, is the fact that he failed to apply his own principles with
sufficient rigour to the concept of the human body - one can only assume that this
w as an oversight caused by Adorno s own circumstances of production rather than
lacking the courage of his own convictions - but the idea that the body’s relation to
m usic is immediate, somehow immune to the processes of mediation that take
place all around it, is endemic (if not universal) in musicology, and has
consequently mistaken the actuality of music reception’s means of resistance.
Tim e and again one sees recourse to the idea of the body as some form of
‘transcendental ground,’ absolutized as a guarantor of authenticity, but rarely does
one see the full acknowledgement that a ‘form of life’ is in every sense a
contingent entity, and functions as an absolute only in a particular context. Indeed,
I have already quoted authors in chapter two, such as Christopher Small, who are
guilty of this, and even Simon Frith repeatedly draws on a somewhat romanticized
and idealized notion of the body in music, as when he writes:

Music making and music listening, that is to say, are bodily matters; they involve what
one might call social movements. In this respect, musical pleasure is not derived from
fantasy - it is not mediated by daydreams - but is experienced directly: music gives us
a real experience of what the ideal could be.35

I choose to address Frith on this issue not because he is a prime offender; if

anything the reverse is true, for there are many writers given to a great deal less
self-reflection and care when writing of music, and there is much in the above
quotation with which I would readily agree. Frith has taken on board the work of

35 Frith, S., Performing Rites, p. 274.

 121

Adorno (indeed he was one of the first writers on popular music to do so, although
with some obvious provisos with respect to popular culture), regarding the
presence of productive forces and social mediation of the musical text, and if
anything he applies these ideas more rigorously to the notion of the body than
does Adorno. Frith counters A dorno’s passive and unengaged body-object, an
object that reacts precisely,’ with the idea of the body as an active and productive
entity, dialectically engaged with and formative of ‘the social.’ And yet at the same
time he seems to be drawing on the same uncritical notion of an ‘immediate body,’
invoking the 'essentially hum an’ via its autonomic functions; he has his socially
dialectical cake and eats it in positing the simultaneous existence of an ideal’
bodily location. As Brian Massumi puts it in discussing the related notion of
‘intensity,’ this ‘inevitably raises the objection that such a notion involves an appeal
to a pre-reflexive, romantically raw domain of primitive experiential richness - the
nature in our culture.’36
I will return to the question of autonomic response presently, but the
problem with Frith’s model is not in its internal logic, but in the paradigm of both the
body and music that it employs. Frith disassembles Adorno’s body-as-site-of-
reception only to reconstitute it as a site of reception and production, when the
problem was not the absence of product in itself, but the setting up of the body as
a site, a location which serves as the origin of sound, or upon which sound acts.
This becomes clearer in Frith’s discussion of voice, of which he writes: ‘The voice
seems particularly expressive of the body: it gives the listener unmediated access
to it.’37 As the astute reader will by now probably be aware, the key word here is
‘unm ediated.’ In order to maintain this idea Frith replicates one fundamental
mistake in two ways: first the definition of the body as a discrete object-product
(which retains this status regardless of whether it is fixed or unfixed) that might act
as a source of sound, rather than as a medium that is itself en proces (to borrow
Kristeva’s term), and second the misunderstanding of sound itself, reifying it as a
concrete thing, product, rather than as the performing of an action, a modulation of
atmospheric pressure, process.

36 Massumi, B., The Autonomy of Affect,’ in Deleuze: A Critical Reader, ed. Patton, P.,
(Oxford, Blackwell, 1996), p. 223.
37 Frith, S., ‘The Body Electric,’ Critical Quarterly, 37:2, (1995), p. 1.
 122

The point at which both music and the body are objectified is the point at
which they lose whatever resistive potency their intersection might have had. As
Terry Eagleton notes in The Ideology o f the Aesthetic, the aesthetic project first
outlined by Baumgarten was devised as a means of ideologizing that which lay
outside the purview of the category of reason, such that T h e aesthetic springs into
being as a kind of cognitive underlabourer, to know in its uniqueness all that to
which higher reason is necessarily blind.’38 The aesthetic is a socialization and
subjectification of affect in order to create meaning in the form of emotion, which in
turn serves as a tacit explanation and justification of the social order: A t the very
root of social relations lies the aesthetic, source of all human relations.’39 Thus any
attempt to deterritorialize musical sensation in the guise of object-product, via the
body as object-product, serves only to effect a massive reterritorialization40 onto
the same old category of the ideal; there is no point in a movement to process if it
is only done in order to restore meaning in a new site. To paraphrase an old
cliche, it is not just that the travelling is important, rather than the arriving - there is
no arrival, nowhere at which to arrive. The body adopts the function of site, while
retaining a status other than that of the unitary location. As Brian Massumi writes,
T h e body doesn’t just absorb pulses or discrete stimulations; it infolds contexts, it
infolds volitions and cognitions that are nothing if not situated. Intensity is asocial
but not presocial - it includes social elements, but mixes them with elements
belonging to other levels of functioning, and combines them according to different
logic.’41 And in order to access the resistive power of the body in music this new
paradigm is required, one in which the parameters of the body are altered and
extended, an opening up of m eaning-product in order to remain en proces, in
jouissance.
Frith’s discussion of voice referred to above was formulated in response to
the renowned essay by Roland Barthes, T h e Grain of the Voice,’ a text cited
repeatedly in musicological approaches to the body. The definition of grain’ that is

38 Eagleton, T., The Ideology of the Aesthetic, pp. 16-7.

39 Ibid., p. 24
40 Both the terminology, and the point made here, is owed to Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F.,
op. cit., p 348
41 Massumi, B., The Autonomy of Affect,’ op. cit., p. 223.
 123

most often taken away is that of ‘the body in the voice as it sings,’42 but the
subtleties of Barthes’ argument are frequently overlooked in the desire to claim this
as a support for the straightforward expression of physicality in the voice, which is
then tied to an ‘organic’ and ‘natural’ web of (Romantic) metaphor. A close
reading, however, will reveal that this is almost exactly what Barthes is arguing
against, as, for instance, in his stating: ‘Opera is a genre in which the voice has
gone over in its entirety to dram atic expressivity, a voice with a grain which little
signifies. ... The voice is not personal: it expresses nothing of the cantor, of his
soul.’43 Indeed, given that Frith opens by describing Barthes’ T h e Grain of the
Voice’ as ‘his argument that different timbral qualities have different bodily
im plications,’44 when Barthes explicitly states T h e “grain” of the voice is not - or
not merely - its tim bre,’45 one begins to suspect that there has been a systematic
misreading of Barthes’ intentions. As Frith correctly notes, T h is point is usually
taken up in music criticism as a celebration of “the materiality of the body,”’46 but
the nature of ‘the body’ that is being celebrated here is not an issue that is in
question, despite the fact that this is arguably the key concept of the essay. There
is a powerful element of critics taking from Barthes what they want to hear, or
rather read, regardless of what he has to say, and in doing so they have missed
the formulation of an entirely new paradigm of the body in music that frees critique
from the situated body of the aesthetic project.
Barthes begins T h e Grain of the Voice’ with a discussion of the problems
faced in the translation of music into language through the form of the predicate,
and the limitations that this places upon perception by situating the subject and
tying him or her into an ethical (which is at once an aesthetical) system.

The man who provides himself or is provided with an adjective is now hurt, now
pleased, but always constituted. .. . A historical dossier ought to be assembled here, for
adjectival criticism (or predicative interpretation) has taken on over the centuries

42 Barthes, R., The Grain of the Voice,’ in Image-Music-Text, p. 188.

43 Ibid., pp. 181-2.
44 Frith, S., The Body Electric,’ op. cit., p. 1.
45 Barthes, R., The Grain of the Voice,’ op. cit., p. 185.
46 Frith, S., The Body Electric,’ op. cit., p 1.
 124

certain institutional aspects. The musical adjective becomes legal whenever an ethos
of music is postulated, each time, that is, that music is attributed a regular - natural or
magical - mode of signification.47

If one wishes to disrupt the system of exchange set in place by this mode of
musical ‘understanding,’ the answer is not to be found in ‘struggling against the
adjective,’48 as Adorno might be said to do, but instead by attempting ‘to change
the musical object itself, as it presents itself to discourse, better to alter its level of
perception of intellection, to displace the fringe of contact between music and
language.'49 If the rules of the game are stacked against you, the answer is not to
try to change the rules of the gam e in the teeth of opposition, but to play a different
game. The nature of this displacement is not simply a change of location, but the
opening up of an entirely new space, or more correctly space-time, 'where melody
explores how the language works and identifies with that work. It is, in a very
simple word but which must be taken seriously, the diction of the language.’50
Diction, the m anner of enunciation, the way in which something is done, action,
process. ‘The grain is ... almost certainly signifiance,’51 and as such is concerned
with the undoing of subjecthood rather than a constitution or expression of
corporeal essence. Indeed, in T h e Third M eaning’ (which might be regarded as a
com panion piece to ‘The Grain of the V oice’ insofar as it addresses signifiance in
the image, as opposed to sound) Barthes quite bluntly states of the obtuse (which
is to say, signifiance): ‘Something in the two faces [on film] exceeds psychology,
anecdote, function, exceeds meaning without, however, coming down to the
obstinacy in presence shown by any human body.’52 There is little point in
dissolving the art object and the subject into process, only to reinscribe them both
in an objectified corporeality.

47 Barthes, R., The Grain of the Voice,’ op, cit., pp. 179-80.
48 Ibid., p. 180.
49 Ibid., pp. 180-1.
50 Ibid., pp. 182-3.
51 Ibid., p. 182.
52 Barthes, R., The Third Meaning: Research notes on some Eisenstein stills,’ in Image
Music Text, p. 54.
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In order to comprehend the way in which Barthes conceives of ‘the body,’

one needs to approach it in terms other than that of either the socially determined
entity or the self-contained, living, breathing organism; it is individuated, but it ‘has
no civil identity.’53 His criticism of Fischer-Dieskau makes clear that he does not
regard breathing as a genuinely ‘bodily’ activity: grain is not to be found in the
lungs ('a stupid organ’54), contrary to the suggestion of both Frith and Middleton,55
but rather in the throat, the sinuses, the resonant cavities of the body. W here the
lungs might be regarded as a site of production of sound, that which Barthes
designates as ‘body’ are those elements that modify the acoustic of the voice, a
mediation of the sound of air rushing across the vocal chords. And yet the very
instant of stating the phrase 'mediation of the voice’ is already to have made a
mistake: voice is always-already mediated. To say that it has been mediated by
the body, or indeed anything else, be that the listener’s ear-drum or the room in
which it sounds, is to imply that vocal ‘essence’ has been lost, that there exists a
primal ‘ur-voice’ that one might access if only the forces of mediation could be
stripped away. As the surprise of hearing one’s own voice on a recording bears
testament, there is no absolute characteristic of a voice; it is a mediate
phenomenon, characteristic of the medium in and through which it sounds and
nothing more. The Barthesian body is not an originary source of sound so much
as a mediator through which sound passes, a system of resonance and feedback,
and grain is the audible presence of that mediation. The point at which 'we catch
ourselves listening to the modulations and harmonics of that voice without hearing
what it is saying to us,’56 is the point at which grain is revealed to us. Thus it is the
idea of mediation that is crucial to experiencing grain or signifiance; not the
resultant of that mediation, nor the means of mediation, but an awareness of the
act of mediation itself, a foregrounding of process. The body is a system of
resonance that filters and distorts the sound that passes through it. In much the
same way that the rare subatomic particles generated by the collisions that take

53 Barthes, R., The Grain of the Voice,' op. cit., p. 182.

54 Ibid., p. 183.
55 See Frith, S., The Body Electric,’ op. cit., p. 2, and Middleton, R., op. cit., p. 261.
56 Barthes, R., ‘Listening,’ in The Responsibility of Forms, trans. Howard, R., (University of
California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1991), p. 255.
 126

place in a particle accelerator are apprehended not by unmediated vision, but

through a detection of the pattern of their mutual interactions (and this is a method
repeated throughout the disciplines of cosm ology and physics), so the body
becom es available to comprehension through the way in which it modifies sound.
‘W e know nothing about a body until we know what it can do, in other words what
its affects are, how they can or cannot enter into composition with other affects,
with the affects of another body.’57
The Barthesian body has ceased to be either an object that receives and
processes, or else a secure site of sound generation, but is rather a performative
interm ediary through which sound passes. As Deleuze and Guattari have it: ‘We
thus leave behind the assemblages to enter the age of the Machine,’58 and the
Barthesian body is very close to the idea of the ‘sound m achine’ proposed by
Deleuze and Guattari, which they concretize in the figure of ‘the synthesizer,’
noting that: The synthesizer makes audible the sound process itself, the
production of that process, and puts us in contact with still other elements beyond
sound m atter.’59 Neither is the close connection between the technological’ and
the rendering overt of the always-already mediated something of which Barthes is
unaware: having deconstructed the body of Fischer-Dieskau, the terms in which he
praises Panzera are decidedly machinic. The rolled ‘r’ has a ‘metallic brevity of
vibration;’60 he describes Panzera’s vowel sounds in terms of ‘the purity — almost
electronic, so much was its sound tightened, raised, exposed, held.’61 This does
more than simply emphasize that the body is fundamentally a locus of mediation; it
serves to show that the process of mediation itself is underwritten by ‘technology,’
for to suggest that something has been ‘technologized’ is to recognize that the way
in which it interacts with the subject has been altered. The radical work done by
grain’ is in the extension of this process into the subject itself.

57 Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F., A Thousand Plateaus, p. 257.

58 Ibid., p. 343.
59 Ibid., p. 343. I would, however, strongly disagree with the implications of the notion of
sound matter, except insofar as it is recognized that matter is itself at once particle and
wave formation, as discussed in chapter 2.
60 Barthes, R., The Grain of the Voice,’ op. cit., p. 185
61 Ibid., p. 185. The emphasis is Barthes’ own.
 127

If I perceive the “grain” in a piece of music and accord this “grain" a theoretical value
(the emergence of the text in the work), I inevitably set up a new scheme of evaluation
which will certainly be individual ... but in no way “subjective" (it is not the
psychological “subject" in me who is listening; the climactic pleasure hoped for is not
going to reinforce - to express - that subject but, on the contrary, to lose it).62

The intertwining of the subject and its technologization is particularly

pronounced and complicated in the field of popular music, simultaneously enabling
and dissolving the myth of ‘authenticity’ in rock music and the positioning of the
subject therein. As Frith has pointed out in his earlier work, it is paradoxical that a
technologically sophisticated medium ... rests on an old-fashioned model of direct
communication - A plays to B and the less technology lies between them the
closer they are, the more honest their relationship and the fewer the opportunities
for manipulation and falsehoods.’63 This is the model that lay behind the booing of
Bob Dylan by his audience when he went ‘electric.’ Frith demonstrates how this
fundam entally nineteenth-century view of music as expression of the subject is
woefully misapplied to pop and rock music - not only is its existence based upon
the technology of recording, the displacing of the performing subject, but through
the development of studio technology it has enabled the subject to express him or
herself more exactly, in ways that would have been impossible or unimaginable in
direct performance. The myth of the authentic subject in popular music falls down
on even on its own terms, but more importantly (at least in the current context), this
technological supplementarity of the subject explicitly poses the question of where
the technology, as process of mediation, ends and the subject begins.
The most telling example of this is the development of the electrical
microphone, which was closely allied to the rise of popular music as a mass
culture phenomenon. The amplification of a softly spoken voice enabled an
entirely new style of singing to emerge, termed ‘crooning,’ and as Frith notes: Its
general effect was to extend the possibilities of the public expressions of private
feelings in all pop genres.’64 The mediating power of the technology begins to blur

62 Ibid., p. 188.
63 Frith, S., ‘Art versus technology: the strange case of popular music,’ Media, Culture and
Society, 8, (1986), pp. 266-7.
64 Ibid., p. 270.
 128

both the relationship between putative sound production and sound receiver, which
is to say the subject and the collective, and also blurs the boundaries between the
singer and his or her technologization - there is an interpenetration of the body of
the singer and its mediation. Frith wrote this essay in 1986, but subsequent
developments have only increased the extent to which the two have become
confluent: witness the band Daft Punk, pioneers of the ‘filtered disco’ sound, who
only appear in public in the form of two robots, conducting interviews through a
Steven Hawking-style computerized voice processor.
These ideas are clearly of great interest to the Icelandic singer-com poser
Bjork, and one can see a repeated referral to these ideas in her music videos and
the literature surrounding her work, particularly in the enigmatically titled Post, a
companion book to her album of the same name. Sjon Sigurdsson tells the story
of NovaBjork,’ a girl found buried in the forest and ‘m ended’ through a process of
amalgamation. He writes:

The composer gathered together instruments from the 01’ World and the Nu. With
sure hands he placed harp strings, microchips, pieces of brass, tiny transistors and
other Energies inside the girl’s body.65

W e have here the clearest possible articulation of the notion of the ‘technological
body,’ or as Steve Sweeney-Turner describes it in this context, a cybjork. The
technologization or mediation of the organic is played out both in her lyrics, and in
the computer modulation of ‘found sounds’ in her music, as well as an illustration
of the cybjork in the video to ‘All is Full of Love.’ It is in the video to 'Hyperballad,’
however, that one sees a reflection-echo of the part played by the video itself in
the further technologization of the musician.
The track opens with an ethereal tone cluster (Bb, C, Eb, F - the tonality of
the verse section hovers between C minor and Bb major throughout) played on
synthesized strings, under which enters an electronically generated sound lacking

65 Sigurdsson, S., ‘The Birth of NovaBjork: a tale in the old style of Science Fiction,’ in
Sigurdsson et at, Post, (Bloomsbury, London, 1995), quoted by Steve Sweeney-Turner in
an unpublished paper Bjork and the Figure of the Machine.’
 129

any sort of attack, that slowly descends through a repeated Et>, D, C two octaves
below middle C, mapping a wide sonic space. The image that accom panies this is
of a modelled landscape of a plain and distant mountains, over which move
com puterized clouds, instantly picking up the motif of mediated organicism. As the
scattershot drum break enters with a statement-echo pattern driving through each
bar, sim ilar in rhythm to the clatter of a railway, the camera pulls round to show an
apparently lifeless Bjork lying amongst leaf litter, but with an electronic ‘haze’
crackling across her in time to the drum rhythm, in a parallel, superposed plane.
With the entry of the vocal line a second, ghostly imprint of a singing Bjork
appears, again superimposed upon ‘organic’ Bjork and the ‘electric’ plane. Not
only does this serve to confound authorial presence, but it also illustrates the
technologized, mediated voice, and the mediation of the Bjork-image in the video.
A third, ‘com puter-gam e’ Bjork appears with the chorus, running across the model
landscape which is now also superposed with computer graphics, before enacting
the line ‘I imagine what my body would sound like, slamming against those rocks’
(see Appendix), and returning to the dead Bjork/ singing Bjork composite, until all
three are superposed in a sim ultaneously static and moving landscape. (It is
difficult to describe the full com plexity of the series of superimposed levels
compressed into a single plane that form the image track to this video, but it
involves at least three pieces of footage that are combined using motion tracking
techniques.) In this problematization of movement in space-time, the combining of
‘organic’ and ‘machinic’ sounds technologically with the singer-com poser’s unique
Icelandic inflected diction, and then routing all of this through a set of ‘bodies’ that
are all moving in unison and all identifiably Bjork, any notion of a distinct, originary
singing body as sound-source, opposed to its technological status, is com pletely
overrun. W hat might at first appear to be the corporeal alienation of Bjork’s voice,
instead becomes the means of reinscribing Bjorkness’ across a series of
technologized corporealizations. To paraphrase Deleuze and Guattari, Bjork and
Michel Gondry, the director, make audio-visual the sound-image process, the
production of that process, in a music-video machine.
 130

III

Could a machine think? - Could it be in pain? - Well, is the human body to be called
such a machine? It surely comes as close as possible to being such a machine.66

A s with Barthes, the W ittgensteinian body can be considered as a machine, but

w hat m echanisms does this body enact, and how might this ‘m achine’ be related to
the wider concept of technology? As outlined above, Barthes’ ‘m achine’ is a
com plex set of interactions, the parameters of which are largely undefined: with
respect to the voice, the m achine-body is only one part of a wider field of
technological forces; the extent of the mediation process is unfixed at both ends of
the spectrum, so that the distinction body/non-body becomes a difficult one to
draw. And it seems that similar problems arise with the W ittgensteinian body,
which is above all a thinking body, processual: ‘But surely a machine cannot think!
- Is that an empirical statement? No. W e only say of a human being and what is
like one that it thinks.’67 But when one begins to attempt to locate the thought
process, whether it be in a human or any other sort of object, one starts to run up
against the same problems seen earlier when trying to fix something that is
fundam entally motile: T h e chair is thinking to itself: ... W HERE? In one of its
parts? Or outside its body: in the air around it? Or not anywhere at all?’68 And as
W ittgenstein suggests, situating thought either within or without the supposedly
fixed boundaries of the body-object is a fruitless activity: “Thinking takes place in
the head” really means only “the head is connected with thinking.” O f course one
says also “I think with my pen" and this localization is at least as good.’69 Like the
Barthesian body, the body as thinking-m achine is an entity without a definite
beginning and end, difficult, but not impossible, to discern from its background.

66 Wittgenstein, L., Philosophical Investigations, §359.

67 Ibid., §360.
68 Ibid., §361.
69
Wittgenstein, L., Philosophical Grammar, ed. Rhees, R., trans. Kenny, A., (Blackwell,
Oxford, 1974), §64.
 131

Although both W ittgenstein and Barthes provide an effective deconstruction

and problematization of the individual body, neither leaves a clear map as to how
to reconceptualize the new relation between the body and the collective: the status
of the subject within W ittgenstein’s ‘form of life’ is decidedly vague. An analogy is
provided, however, by Deleuze and Guattari in the form of the ‘tool,’ which seems
an apt theorization of the technological body, so long as one is careful not to
sim ply perform a reterritorialization of the idea of technology onto isolated tools.
Deleuze and Guattari state:

The material or machinic aspect of assemblage relates not to the production of goods
but rather to a precise state of intermingling of bodies in a society, including all the
attractions and repulsions, sympathies and antipathies, alterations, amalgamations,
penetrations, and expansions that affect bodies of all kinds in their relations to one
another. ... Even technology makes the mistake of considering tools in isolation: tools
exist only in relation to the interminglings they make possible or that make them
possible. The stirrup entails a new man-horse symbiosis that at the same time entails
new weapons and new instruments. Tools are inseparable from symbioses or
amalgamations defining a Nature-Society machinic assemblage. They presuppose a
social machine that selects them and takes them into its “phylum:” a society is defined
by its amalgamations, not by its tools.70

This goes some way to clarifying the nature of the individual in theory - the
Barthesian singing voice is a fine example of a Nature-Society machinic
assem blage' - but still leaves open the question of the precise mechanism by
which material bodies perceive, or at least interiorize, their own ‘state of
interm ingling.’
A clue as to how one might apprehend individuation without denying the
continuity of individual and context is given by Ernst Bloch:

We do not possess it, that which all this around us ... is or signifies, because we are it
itself and are standing too close to it. ... But the sound burns out of us, the heard note,
not the sound itself or its forms. This, however, shows us our path without alien

70 D eleuze, G. and G uattari, F., op. cit., p. 90.

 132

means, our historically inward path, as a fire in which not the vibrating air but we
ourselves begin to quiver and cast off our cloaks.71

There is an undeniable strain of mysticism and neo-W agnerian romanticism to

B loch’s imagery in this essay, but the important distinction he makes between ‘the
heard note’ and ‘the sound itse lf in the human body makes clear that the
distinctiveness of individual resonance is in no way connected to the notion of the
body as sound producer. And as Massumi describes, the autonomic processes of
the body that perceive resonance provide a mechanism that binds the interior and
exterior, subject and object, in such a way as to enable Barthes’ individuation that
‘is not in the psychological subject' (see above). 'Brain and skin form a resonating
vessel. Stimulation turns inward, is folded into the body, except that there is no
inside for it to be in, because the body is radically open, absorbing impulses
quicker than they can be perceived, and because the entire vibratory event is
unconscious, out of m ind.’72 The individual is autonomous only insofar as
autonom ic response retains 'the trace of past actions including a trace o f their
contexts ... conserved in the brain and the flesh, but out of mind and out of body
understood as qualifiable inferiorities.’73 The corporeal phenomenon that Massumi
describes is proprioception: it is a characteristic of the flesh that infolds ‘the surface
of contact between perceiving subject and perceived object,’74 and acts as a
m emory-bearing entity that operates in parallel to the emergence of subjectivity.
‘Proprioception translates the exertions and ease of the body’s encounters with
objects into a muscular memory of relationality. This is the cumulative m emory of
skill, habit, posture,’75 and one might well add the experience of sound to this list.
Indeed, Freud's own mature theory of memory allows for such a suggestion,
insofar as ‘the subject centres itself in consciousness on the site where memory

71 Bloch, E., The philosophy of music,’ in Essays on the Philosophy of Music, trans
Palmer, P., (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1985), p. 1.
72 Massumi, B., The Autonomy of Affect,’ op. cit., p. 222.
73 Ibid., p. 223.
74 Massumi, B., The Bleed: Where Body Meets Image,’ in Welchman, J (ed.), Rethinking
Borders, (Macmillan, London, 1996), p. 30.
75 Ibid., p 31.
 133

traces have established an infrastructure for such centring.’76 Massumi has simply
displaced the social construction of the memory trace from the conscious brain to
the w ider nervous system in a way that is not unrelated to subjectivity, but neither
is it dependent upon it.

Proprioception effects a double translation of the subject and the object into the body,
at a medium depth where the body is only body, having nothing of the profundity of the
self nor of the superficiality o f external encounter. This asubjective and non-objective
medium depth is one of the strata proper to the corporeal; it is a dimension of the flesh.
The memory it constitutes could be diagrammed as a superposition of vectorial fields
composed of multiple points in varying relations of movement and rest, pressure and
resistance, each field corresponding to an action.77

This network of nervous tissue is the technological body, the collectivized

individual, moulding the passage of sound in such a way that ‘space-time is not
external to the body but generated by it.’78 It reveals the fallacy of the idea that
mediation opens a space between subject and object, which conceals the truth of
their indissoluble enmeshment. It is a holding still of the musical moment en
proces in the form of potentiality or incipience - gesture yet to come and past
gesture in one. But it is not the end of the story.

The collective is a body, too. And the physis that is being organised for it in technology
can, through all its political and factual reality, only be produced in that image sphere to
which profane illumination initiates us. Only when in technology body and image so
interpenetrate that all revolutionary tension becomes bodily collective innervation, and

76 Mowitt, J., The sound of music in the era of its electronic reproducibility,’ in Leppert, R
and McClary, S. (eds), Music and Society: the politics of composition, performance and
reception, (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1987), p. 183. As Mowitt discusses,
this particular point is made by Derrida.
77 Massumi, B., The Bleed: Where Body Meets Image,’ op. cit., p. 31
78 Lefebvre, H., see chapter 2, n. 61.
 134

all the bodily innervations of the collective become revolutionary discharge, has reality
transcended itself to the extent demanded by the Communist Manifesto.79

This unusual passage of prose that closes Benjamin’s essay on surrealism

anticipates the formation of the technological body, but perhaps overestimates its
political agency. A similarly utopian vision is proposed by John Mowitt in his essay
on the technologies of music reception: ‘If Marx could regard the proletariat as a
concrete manifestation of theory, then perhaps contemporary music can be seen
as a gateway to the new collectivity, since it situates subjects within an emergent
structure of listening which offers experiential confirmation of social
configuration.’80 The technological body is not a call for the wholesale rejection of
the subject, but for a new conception of the subject that is implicitly collective. Its
expression is not necessarily revolutionary, as Benjamin hopes; Massumi has
discussed the ways in which the right has taken control of the postmodern body.’
Benjam in (via Eagleton) states that ‘the body must be reprogrammed and
reinscribed by the power of the sensuous image;’81 Mowitt calls for a new
inscription of popular m emory’ through the collectivizing potential of popular
music. Music video-ing is not a revolutionary art practise, but the reformulation of
aesthetics that its study demands, its conjoining of popular memory with the
sensuous image, might enable a shift from ‘being’ to ‘becoming,’ and open a new
vectorial space-time where not just television, but the sign itself is music(k)ed, so
that an interrogation of the sign, of representation, could take place.

79
Benjamin, W., 'Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia,’ in
Reflections, trans. Jephcott, E., (Schocken, New York, 1986), p 192. Also quoted in
Eagleton, T., The Ideology of the Aesthetic, p. 336.
80 Mowitt, J., op. cit., p. 193.
81 Eagleton, T., The Ideology of the Aesthetic, p. 336.
 Conclusion

“I’m confused. Is this a happy ending or a sad ending?’’

“It’s an ending. That’s enough.”1

M usic videos are neither intended, nor very often received as attacks on the notion
o f capital, monologistic aesthetics, or anything else for that matter; more often they
are precisely the opposite, calculated by corporations to maximize return on a
cultural commodity. Anyone hoping to inspire revolution by subjecting the
populace to large doses of boy bands and ‘nu-m etal’ videos will be a long time
waiting. It would be foolish to ignore the fact that both the denoted and connoted
m essages of the great majority of music videos (the Barthesian ‘obvious’
m eaning), are supportive of the capitalist system almost to the point of
propaganda. W hether one looks at the level of the individual video’s ‘pseudo-
narrative,’ or the ‘star-text’ of the meta-narrative, the same set of ideals based
around the notion of the ‘pop-star,’ and in particular his or her conspicuous
consumption, predominate. Much of the foregoing argument has attempted to
show how, despite this fact, the nature of the intertwining of music and image in
m usic video simultaneously undoes the ideology represented, not by countering it,
but by problematizing the very notion of representation. This refusal of meaning,
obvious’ or otherwise, derived from the experience of music, only a short time
after ‘new’ musicologists have worked so hard to bring it into the equation might be
regarded as a controversial move, but it is borne of the belief that a critical project
founded upon direct opposition to the status quo, although by no means worthless,
is in the end unlikely ever to fulfil its aims. Its inevitable consequence is the
reduction of music analysis to ‘the dilemma of either the predicable or the

1 Exchange between Lisa and Marge Simpson, The Simpsons, episode reference
unknown.
 136

ineffable.1' The alternative proposed here, however, is no more certain to achieve

critical consciousness, and indeed there are serious obstacles to this. Most
notable among these is the acceptance that the process of comprehension, of
clarification, must take place within one’s own ‘form of life,’ be based upon existing
praxis, which inevitably nullifies any political agency beyond step by step extension
of praxis from within the ‘blind spots’ of a culture. Hence M ontefiore and Taylor’s
suggestion, quoted above, that the W ittgensteinian appears to the critical theorist
to be ‘preaching an obscurantist acceptance of the status quo,’3 and also the vital
im portance of Kristeva’s work, whatever its weaknesses might be. Given the task
o f formulating a practical and effective critical theory, I, like the country bumpkin
called upon for directions, would not start from here, but here is where one must
begin.
W hat then, is the relationship between theory and practice in the creation
and experience of music video? If, as I have suggested, music videos perform a
transform ation of the object into activity, an event en proces, it is perhaps pertinent
to ask what this activity is, what is it that is being done? In a sense this has been
the thrust of this entire thesis: an attempt to embed an aesthetics of music video
w ithin the world, to understand the object in terms of the actions it performs, above
all to clarify the nature of the affective charge I sense in the encounter with it. And
yet it is undeniable that concrete instances of these events remain remarkably
difficult both to locate, and to discuss in an illuminating way. There is certainly
space here for some hard sociological analysis, to determine both how music
videos are typically (and atypically) received, and the aesthetic criteria invoked in
their production, in order to ascertain the extent to which these theoretical
possibilities are being played out in actuality.
Ultimately the power of music or music video to effect material change is
limited: when faced with the raw power of the barrel of a gun or a tank it is as
im potent as any other art, regardless of its capacity to collectivize. W hat power it
does have is the potential to alter one’s perception of material reality; to produce
(be producing?) an ‘incorporeal transform ation’ of the conditions of being. To take

2 Barthes, R., T h e Grain of the Voice,’ op. cit., p. 180.

3 Montefiore, A. and Taylor, C., op. cit., p. 21. See p. 92 above for full quotation.
 137

o ne of Deleuze and Guattari’s own exam ples,4 the action of a hijacker brandishing
a w eapon transforms the plane into a prison, the passengers into hostages, and
yet the material conditions remain unaltered. T h e transformation applies to bodies
but is itself incorporeal, internal to enunciation.’5 Similarly, in reformulating the
m ode of interaction between sound and image, based upon aesthetic criteria
derived from a consideration of music, one’s understanding of the world is
instantaneously relativized. As with W ittgenstein s ‘duck-rabbit,’6 one is suddenly
confronted with an alternative mode of cognition, in such a way as to require a
reappraisal of one’s relationship to the entity in question, and generate a
previously unimagined social reality and praxis.
One sees both of these possibilities explored (that is, conventional
oppositional critique and incorporeal transformation), in the video to ‘Remind M e’
by the Norwegian ambient dance group Royksopp. Taking off from the title and
repeated intonation of the chorus lyric ‘remind m e,’ the video demythologizes
aspects of everyday working life, by appropriating the form at of the technical
diagram and animating it - a train journey is seen in terms of the relative statistics
on modes of travel, as it passes through a cross-sectional image of tunnel
construction, and via a diagram of the shifting patterns of signals and points.
Similarly, a young wom an’s lunchtime burger is transformed into a part of a cow,
w hich is in turn part of a herd, and the industrial processing of the milk involved in
th e production of her milkshake is passed through. Although the video’s
avoidance of naturalistic representation and appropriation of the imagistic tools’ of
industrialization to the form of animation, as well as its highlighting of industrial
processing itself, might be regarded as straightforwardly resistive, it is when these
im ages are conjoined with music that they have a genuinely subversive potential.
T he stock market graphs and production charts that are presented as part of the
office environment are m usicked here, made to ‘dance’ and move to the rhythm of
the music. The imagery of international finance is transformed at an affective
level; it ceases to be representative and is made sensuous.

4 Given in Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F., A Thousand Plateaus, p. 81.

5 Ibid., p. 82.
5 See Wittgenstein, L., Philosophical Investigations, pp. 194-6.
 138

This strategy is not without risk: affect in itself is entirely lacking in critical
capacity, and as Deleuze and Guattari note of sound, ‘since its force of
deterritorialization is the strongest, it also effects the most massive of
reterritorializations.'' There remains the possibility that the demythologizing
rhetoric of the images in the ‘Remind M e’ video are neither reinforced nor
superseded by their relation to the sound track, but are instead recommodified in a
w a y that the music serves to conceal. There is a danger in overstressing the
‘redem ptive’ capacities of music, and of tying it too firmly to the idea of an ‘aural
parad igm ’ suggested above, for which an aesthetics of sound alone was only a
prom pt. One sees, on occasion, a favouring of the affective, the sensuous, in the
realm of the image also, particularly in the films of directors such as Scorsese and
Tarantino (often in association with prominent sound tracks), and in much
photographic art. Aesthetic appreciation is predicated on the simultaneous
presence of both ‘visual’ and ‘aural’ paradigms, their intermingling, not in an
either/or relationship, but in their shifting patterns of emphasis.
There are times at which the ‘aural paradigm ’ comes uncomfortably close
to the nineteenth-century category of the transcendent, with a shiny new
postm odern veneer. Reinscribing ‘the unsayable’ in signifiance, and then showing
how ‘the aural’ has privileged access to this realm, may appear to reinstate m usic’s
connection to ‘the ineffable,’ but this would be to misunderstand the profoundly
socialized, if not entirely effable, character of signifiance, which Kristeva
dem onstrates is based precisely in the space of interaction between subject and
society.8 My use of terms such as ‘m usicalization’ may obfuscate instead of
illum inating this point, but this is due to the difficulty of the problem faced, rather
than a simple matter of terminology. ‘G esture,’ as defined in chapter 2 above, is
an attempt to bind the material and the social in a single entity, so as to facilitate
m aterial analysis that is at once a form of social critique - the ‘holy grail’ of critical
musicology. Although theoretically sound, again concrete examples of its
application have proved frustratingly difficult to produce, and the fear must be that
it becomes a means of endlessly delaying a genuine social analysis rather than
enabling it. W hether ‘gesture’ is a useful model of musical, or any other material,

Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F., A Thousand Plateaus, p. 348.

8 Kristeva, J., Revolution in Poetic Language, p. 17.
 139

has still to be proven, but I remain hopeful that it may have avoided many of the
problem s encountered by musicologists on this issue.
An attack on what Barthes terms the ‘Organon of Representation’ that
addressed it directly would involve addressing it on its own terms: in the realm of
the ideal, where objects and music are only ever ciphers of something else, never
sensuous and motile. Music video instead sidesteps this, musicks the image in
such a way as to open it up to collectivization, rather than giving the autonomous
individualized subject the palliative of the ideal. It is not so much what music
videos do, as what they allow. It does not attempt to destroy the status quo, but to
undercut it and set it adrift of its moorings, facilitating its undoing.
If at times I have seemed hostile to the psychoanalytic subject, it is
because of the emphasis it places upon the individual at the expense of the
collective, the private rather than the public. Atomizing the social poses no threat
to hegem onic forces; it only weakens the capacity for resistance. Music video
enables one to recognize, via affective charge, what Deleuze and Guattari refer to
in stating:

There is no individual enunciation. There is not even a subject of enunciation. Yet

relatively few linguists have analyzed the necessarily social character of enunciation.
The problem is that it is not enough to establish that enunciation has this social
character, since it could be extrinsic; therefore too much or too little is said about it.
The social character of enunciation is intrinsically founded only if one succeeds in
demonstrating how enunciation in itself implies collective assemblages9

The affectivity of music acts as a guarantor of the collective assemblage it forms,

and music video can then extend this collectivity into areas where one would not
expect to find it; its radical m ateriality ‘concedes nothing ineffable to the w orld.’10
The aesthetics of music video is, among other things, a Benjaminian aesthetics, in
that it has ‘subverted almost all of traditional aesthetics’ central categories (beauty,

9 Ibid., pp. 79-80. It is worth noting that they absolve Mikhail Bakhtin of any failings
on this score.
10 Barthes, R., Sade/Fourier/Loyola, trans. Miller, R., (Johns Hopkins University
Press, Baltimore, 1976), p. 37.
 140

harm ony, totality, appearance),’" and burrows within the form of the object in order
to und o it, and to extract those m eans of resistance that are still available, but it will
not d o this unaided Like the Brechtian gestus, the critical potential that inheres in
m usic video is given in order to be taken up, and it is only in its being taken up that
its aesthetic might become manifest.

Eagleton, T., The Ideology o f the Aesthetic, p. 338.

 Appendix

Song Lyrics

R .E .M . - Imitation of Life

C harades pop skill,

W a te r hyacinths, named by a poet,
Im itation of life.
Like a koi in a frozen pond,
Like a goldfish in a bowl.
I d o n ’t want to hear you cry.

That sugar cane, that tasted good,

That cinnamon, that’s Hollywood,
C ’mon, c’mon, no-one can see you try.

You want the greatest thing,

The greatest thing since bread came sliced,
Y ou’ve got it all, you’ve got it sized.
Like a Friday fashion show,
Teenager cruising in the corner,
Trying to look like you don’t try.

That sugar cane, that tasted good,

That cinnamon, that’s Hollywood,
C ’mon, c’mon, no-one can see you try.
(No-one can see you cry.)
 142

T h a t sugar cane, that tasted good,

T h a t freezing rain, that’s what you could,
C ’m on, c’mon, no-one can see you cry.

T his sugar cane, this lemonade,

T his hurricane, I’m not afraid,
C ’m on, c’mon, no-one can see me cry.
T his lightning storm, this tidal wave,
This avalanche, I’m not afraid,
C ’mon, c ’mon, no-one can see me cry.

That sugar cane, that tasted good,

T h a t’s who you are, that’s what you could,
C ’mon, c ’mon no-one can see you cry.
(repeat)

Bjork - ‘H y p e r-b a lla d ’

W e live on a mountain
Right at the top.
T h e re ’s a beautiful view
From the top of the mountain.
Every morning I walk towards the edge
And throw little things off
Like:
Car-parts, bottles and cutlery
O r whatever I find lying around.

It’s become a habit,

A way
To start the day.
 143

I go through all this

Before you wake up,
So I can feel happier
To be safe up here with you.

It’s real early morning,

No-one is awake,
I’m back at my cliff,
Still throwing things off.
I listen to the sounds they make
On their way down.
I follow with my eyes ‘til they crash.
Im agine what my body what sound like
Slam m ing against those rocks.

W hen it lands
W ill my eyes
Be closed, or open?

I go through all this

Before you wake up,
So I can feel happier
To be safe up here with you.
(repeat ‘til fade)
 144

Transcription

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 146

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 158

Journal Articles and Papers

Biddle, I. (2000), Kraftwerk and the electronic sublime: synthesis and the politics
of representation at the end of the “analogue era,’” delivered to conference,
‘Popular Music and National Identities,’ at the University of Newcastle upon
Tyne.
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Popular Music, 14, pp. 51-74.
Brackett, D. (1995), T h e Electro-acoustic mirror: voices in American pop,’ Critical
Quarterly, 37:2, pp. 11-27.
Clarke, E.F. (1993), ‘Generativity, Mimesis and the Human Body in Music
Performance,’ Contemporary Music Review, 7, pp. 207-221.
Frangois, A.-L. (1995), ‘Fakin’ it/M akin’ it: Falsetto’s Bid for Transcendence in
1970s Disco Highs,’ Perspectives o f New Music, 33:2, pp. 442-456.
Frith, S. (1986), ‘Art versus technology: the strange case of popular m usic,’ Media,
Culture and Society, 8, pp. 263-279.
Frith, S. (1995), T h e Body Electric,’ Critical Quarterly, 37:2, pp. 1-10.
Gilbert, A. (1981), ‘Musical Space: A Com poser’s View,’ Critical Inquiry, 7, pp. 605-
611.
Hawkins, S. (1996), ‘Perspectives in Popular Musicology,’ Popular Music, 15, pp.
1-36.
Hawkins, S. (2000), ‘Fixity and Indifference in Norwegian Club M usic,’ delivered to
conference, ‘Popular Music and National Identities,’ at the University of
Newcastle upon Tyne.
Jameson, F. (1984), ’Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism ,’ New
Left Review, 146, pp. 53-92.
Kerman, J. (1980), ‘How we got into analysis, and how to get out,’ Critical Inquiry,
7, pp. 311-331.
Kristeva, J. (1973), T h e Semiotic Activity,’ Screen, 14, pp. 25-39.
Lockwood, L. (1974), ‘Aspects of the ‘L’Homme Arm e’ tradition,’ Proceedings o f
the Royal Musical Association, vol. 100, pp. 97-122.
 159

MacCabe, C. (1976), Theory and Film: Principles of Realism and Pleasure,’

Screen, 17:3, pp. 11ff.
Nattiez, J.-J. (1990), ‘Can One Speak of Narrativity in M usic?,’ trans. Ellis, K.,
Journal o f the Royal Musical Association, 115:2, pp. 240-257.
Shepherd, J. (1982), ‘A theoretical model for the sociological analysis of popular
m usics,’ Popular Music, 2, pp. 145-177.
Shepherd, J. (1986), ‘Music consumption and cultural self-identities: some
theoretical and methodological reflections,’ Media, Culture and Society, 8, pp.
305-330.
Slawson, W.A. (1981), T h e Colour of Sound: A Theoretical Study in Musical
Tim bre,’ Music Theory Spectrum, 3, pp. 130ff.
Slawson, W.A. (1987), ‘Sound Colour Dynam ics,’ Perspectives o f New Music, 25,
pp. 156ff.
Stringer, J. (1992), ‘The Smiths: repressed (but remarkably dressed),’ Popular
Music, 11:1, pp. 15-26.
Sweeney-Turner, S. (1998), ‘Bjork and the Figure of the Machine,’ unpublished
paper.
Tagg, P. (1982), Analyzing popular music: theory, method, and practice,’ Popular
Music, 2, pp.37-67.
Tomlinson, G. (1984), T h e W eb of Culture: A Context for M usicology,’ Nineteenth
Century Music, 7, pp. 350-362.
Treadwell, J. (1998), ‘W agner’s Magic Theatre in the 1840s,’ delivered at the Royal
Musical Association Annual Conference, New College, Oxford.
Uitti, F.-M. (1995), Preserving the Scelsi Improvisations,’ Tempo, 194, pp. 12ff.
Vernallis, C. (1998), T h e Aesthetics of Music Video: an analysis of M adonna’s
'Cherish,” Popular Music, 17, pp. 153-185.
Warner, D. (1983), ‘Notes from the Timbre Space,’ Perspectives o f New Music, 21,
pp. 15ff.
 160

Newspaper articles and Websites

Cigarettes, J., ‘Pre-Millennium Pretension: The New Prog,’ New M usical Express,
(7th February 1998), pp. 22-24.
G udm undsdottir, B., ‘Compose yourself: Bjork meets Karlheinz Stockhausen,’
Dazed, (October 1997), pp. 42-46.
Harris, J., T h e Video G eneration,’ The Independent on Sunday: Real Life, (5th
December 1999), pp. 1-2.
Hoskyns, B., ‘Stardust Memories: Glam is making a com eback,’ The Observer
Review, (5th October 1998), p. 2.
McCrone, J., ‘Network Culture: a review of Capra, F., Hidden Connections: A
Science for Sustainable Living, HarperCollins,’ The Guardian Review, (3rd
August 2002), p. 12.
O ’Hagan, S., Beat G eneration,’ The Guardian Weekend, (12th June 1999), pp. 20-
25.
O ’Reilly, J., ‘Face the M usic,’ The Guardian: Friday Review, (5th March 1999), pp.
16-17.
Paz, O., ‘Journeys into the abyss,’ The Guardian Review, (10th August 2002), pp.
28-29.
Sutherland, S. and Cigarettes, J., ‘From Teds to Mods to Hippies to Skins to Punks
to Goths to This: The Death of Tribalism ,’ New M usical Express, (5th
December 1998), pp. 20-22.

T h e Music Video Database’ at www.m vdbase.com .

Biographies and videographies of Chris Cunningham, Michel Gondry and others at
www.director-file.com .
Music video resources at www.sputnik7.com .
 161

Videography

Basement Jaxx (2001), ‘Jus’ 1 Kiss,’ dir. unknown.

Bjork (1995), ‘Hyperballad,’ dir. Michel Gondry.
Bjork (1999), ‘All is Full of Love,' dir. Chris Cunningham.
Chemical Brothers (2002), ‘Star G uitar,’ dir. Michel Gondry.
Daft Punk (1997), ‘Around the W orld,’ dir. Michel Gondry.
Fat Boy Slim (2001), 'Ya M ama,’ dir. Traktor collective.
R.E.M. (2001), 'Imitation of Life,’ dir. Garth Jennings.
Robbie Williams (2000), ‘Let Love Be Your Energy,’ dir. Oily Reid.
Royksopp (2002), ‘Remind M e,’ dir. Mooge and Hillard.
Sinead O ’Connor (c. 1990), ‘Nothing Compares 2 U,’ dir. Kevin Godley.
The Strokes (2002), ‘Hard to Explain,’ dir. Roman Coppola and Johannes Gamble.
The Wiseguys (1999), ‘Start the Com m otion,’ dir. Pedro Romhanyi.