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Toward a Post-Humanist Organicism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 January 2017

Holly Watkins
Holly Watkins*
Affiliation:
Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

Recent critiques of organicism in music studies have assumed that such features as part–whole integration and end-oriented development are essential to comparisons between music and the organic realm. Yet if what is thought to constitute organicism varies with perspectives on organisms in general, then perhaps it is time to take a different view of organicism’s historical legacy. What if the problem is not with the impression that music presents a semblance of the organic, but with the models of the organism brought in to give content to that semblance? In light of novel accounts of organic life currently being formulated by both scientists and thinkers affiliated with post-humanism, I propose to imagine an organicism that dispenses with humanistic conceits and prompts creative reflection on the points of connection between music and organic processes. To that end, this essay first dismantles conventional notions of wholeness and development before going on to consider aspects of the Western musical tradition through the twin lenses of self-organization and the systems theory of German sociologist Niklas Luhmann. In sum, the essay seeks to conserve affinities between music and the organic domain intuited by nineteenth-century listeners while transposing organicism into a register more in tune with contemporary scientific and philosophical thought. By adding new nodes to a critical network established over two centuries ago, this article argues that a post-humanist organicism challenges us to think afresh about what our bodies, our sociality, and our creativity share with non-human entities and ecologies.

Type
Research Article
Information
Nineteenth-Century Music Review , Volume 14 , Issue 1 , April 2017 , pp. 93 - 114
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Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2017 

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Footnotes

The author would like to thank Eric Drott, Roger Moseley, Lisa Jakelski and Melina Esse for their comments on earlier drafts.

References

1 ‘Musical form, right down to its ruptures and proliferations, is comparable to a weed, a rhizome’. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987): 12.

2 Adorno, Theodor, ‘Vers une musique informelle’, in Quasi una Fantasia: Essays on Modern Music, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: Verso, 1998): 306 Google Scholar.

3 E.T.A. Hoffmann, ‘Kreisleriana’, in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Musical Writings: Kreisleriana, The Poet and the Composer, Music Criticism, ed. David Charlton, trans. Martyn Clarke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989): 94.

4 Anonymous translation from the 1992 reissue of the 1966 Bayreuth recording of the opera (Philips 434 425-2).

5 See Solie, Ruth, ‘The Living Work: Organicism and Musical Analysis’, 19th-Century Music 4/2 (1980): 147–156 Google Scholar; and Kerman, Joseph, ‘How We Got Into Analysis and How to Get Out’, Critical Inquiry 7 (1980): 311–322 Google Scholar. John Daverio offers a more positive assessment of organicism in his Nineteenth-Century and the German Romantic Ideology (New York: Schirmer, 1993). For a general account of the history of organicism, including its ancient sources, see G.S. Rousseau, ed., Organic Form: The Life of an Idea (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972).

6 Thaler, Lotte, Organische Form in der Musiktheorie des 19. und beginnenden 20. Jahrhunderts (Munich: Musikverlag Emil Katzbichler, 1984)Google Scholar; Lothar Schmidt, Organische Form in der Musik: Stationen eines Begriff, 1795–1850 (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1990).

7 Thaler, Organische Form, 7.

8 See, for example, Hegel, G.W.F., Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood, trans. H.B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991)Google Scholar: section 269. Anne Harrington’s Reenchanted Science: Holism in German Culture from Wilhelm II to Hitler (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996) challenges the assumption that early twentieth-century biological organicism is inherently conservative or nationalist.

9 Morton, Timothy, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010): 84 Google Scholar. See also Daniel Chua’s Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) and Suzanne Cusick’s ‘Musicology, Gender, and Feminism’, in Rethinking Music, ed. Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist, 471–98 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

10 Thaler, Organische Form, 130.

11 See Michael Pollan, ‘The Intelligent Plant’, The New Yorker (23 December 2013) and Evan Thompson, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). While eighteenth-century commentators sometimes compared the creativity of artists to ‘vegetable genius’, such plant-like unconsciousness was less valued in itself than treated as a stepping stone to higher spiritual achievements. See Abrams, M.H., The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971)Google Scholar: ch. 8.

12 Marder, Michael, Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013): 10 Google Scholar.

13 This critique can be witnessed in a strand of post-humanism that is distinct from both the disembodied, information-centric discourses that N. Katherine Hayles terms ‘posthuman’ and ‘transhumanist’ calls for further hybridizations of humans and technology. See Wolfe, Cary, What Is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010)Google Scholar; and Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). See also Donna Haraway’s When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), which rejects the term posthumanism in favour of a far-reaching notion of ‘companion species’.

14 While I do not think the notion of organicism applies only to common-practice Western music, this essay, like the historical discourse it assesses, remains focused on that tradition.

15 Pollan, ‘The Intelligent Plant’.

16 Pollan, ‘The Intelligent Plant’.

17 On other traits of interest to organicists, see Tarasti, Eero, ‘Metaphors of Nature and Organicism in the Epistemology of Music: A “Biosemiotic” Introduction to the Analysis of Jean Sibelius’s Symphonic Thought’, in Musical Semiotics Revisited, ed. Tarasti (Helsinki: International Semiotics Institute, 2003)Google Scholar.

18 Adorno, ‘Vers une musique informelle’, 306.

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20 Kant, Critique of Judgment, 218.

21 Kant, Critique of Judgment, 219–20 (emphases in original).

22 Kant, Critique of Judgment, 218.

23 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Collected Works, vol. 12 (Scientific Studies), ed. and trans. Douglas Miller (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 58.

24 Goethe, Collected Works, vol. 12, p. 64.

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27 Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, 303 (emphasis in original).

28 Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, 356.

29 Michael Broyles identifies dynamism, wholeness and teleology as the three primary concerns of organicism, but he does not consider differing interpretations of these characteristics or the conceptual difficulties they entail. See his otherwise illuminating essay ‘Organic Form and the Binary Repeat’, Musical Quarterly 66 (1980): 339–60.

30 For a survey of these developments, see Richards, Robert J., The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002)Google Scholar.

31 Adorno, ‘Vers une musique informelle’, 307. Advances in the study of developing embryos inspired the rise of biological organicism – a non-dualistic alternative to vitalist and mechanistic theories – in the early twentieth century. See Harrington, Reenchanted Science and Haraway, Donna J., Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields: Metaphors of Organicism in Twentieth-Century Developmental Biology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976)Google Scholar.

32 Hoffmann, E.T.A., ‘Recension’ [Review of Beethoven, Symphony no. 5], Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 12, No. 40 (4 July 1810): 634 Google Scholar.

33 For more on the contradictory nature of Hoffmann’s image, see the first chapter of my book Metaphors of Depth in German Musical Thought: From E. T. A. Hoffmann to Arnold Schoenberg (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

34 Hanslick, Eduard, On the Musically Beautiful, ed. and trans. Geoffrey Payzant (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1986): 81 Google Scholar.

35 Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful, 81–2.

36 Marder, Plant-Thinking, 108.

37 Marder, Plant-Thinking, 97–105.

38 Deacon, Terrence, Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter (New York: W.W. Norton, 2012): 302 Google Scholar.

39 Elaine P. Miller makes a similar point in her book The Vegetative Soul: From Philosophy of Nature to Subjectivity in the Feminine (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2002): 10.

40 Deacon, Incomplete Nature, 273.

41 Thompson, Mind in Life, 38.

42 Michaelis, Christian Friedrich, ‘Ein Versuch, das innere Wesen der Tonkunst zu entwickeln’, Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 8, No. 43 (23 July 1806): 683 Google Scholar.

43 Michaelis, ‘Ein Versuch’, 676.

44 Michaelis, ‘Ein Versuch’, 675.

45 See, for example, Thompson’s reflections on Husserl in chapter 11 of Mind in Life.

46 Gary Tomlinson refers to this as ‘an effect akin to a phase transition’, in A Million Years of Music: The Emergence of Human Modernity (New York: Zone Books, 2015): 168.

47 Bregman, Albert S., Auditory Scene Analysis: The Perceptual Organization of Sound (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999): 528 Google Scholar.

48 Michaelis, ‘Ein Versuch, das innere Wesen der Tonkunst zu entwickeln’, 675 (‘Einbildungskraft und innere Empfänglichkeit’).

49 See Scott Camazine et al., Self-Organization in Biological Systems (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).

50 Research exploring these directions includes Tomlinson, A Million Years of Music and Aucouturier, Jean-Julien, ‘The Hypothesis of Self-Organization for Musical Tuning Systems’, Leonardo Music Journal 18 (2008): 63–69 Google Scholar.

51 Two precedents for such an approach are DeLanda, Manuel, A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity (London: Continuum, 2006)Google Scholar, and Kohn, Eduardo, How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013)Google Scholar.

52 Luhmann, ‘Self-Organization and Autopoiesis’, in Emergence and Embodiment: New Essays on Second-Order Systems Theory, ed. Bruce Clarke and Mark N.B. Hansen (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009): 143–56, here 147–8.

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54 Meyer, Leonard, Style and Music: Theory, History, and Ideology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989): 3 Google Scholar. In contrast to my approach, Meyer sharply distinguishes stylistic patterning from patterns in the natural world.

55 See Camazine et al., Self-Organization in Biological Systems, 12. By contrast, Phivos-Angelos Kollias argues that performances consist of self-organizing interactions between performers, scores and acoustic spaces, out of whose ‘local interactions’ the work of music emerges. See his essay ‘The Self-Organising Work of Music’, Organised Sound 16 (2011): 192–9.

56 Kant, Critique of Judgment, 220, 217.

57 Bonds, Mark Evan, Absolute Music: The History of an Idea (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014): 105 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

58 See, for example, Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism?; Rampley, Matthew, ‘Art as a Social System: The Sociological Aesthetics of Niklas Luhmann’, Telos 148 (2009): 111–140 Google Scholar; and Moeller, Hans-Georg, The Radical Luhmann (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012)Google Scholar.

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60 Luhmann, Niklas, Social Systems, trans. John Bednarz, Jr., with Dirk Baecker (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995): 40 Google Scholar.

61 On assemblage theory see DeLanda, A New Philosophy of Society.

62 See Maturana, Humberto R. and Varela, Francisco J., Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1980)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

63 Even biological applications of this term, let alone sociological ones, are not universally accepted; see Haraway, When Species Meet, 32–3.

64 See Rampley, ‘Art as a Social System’, 24.

65 Habermas, Jürgen, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1987): 372 Google Scholar.

66 Friedemann Kawohl has argued that the more biological conceptions of organicism which arose in the later nineteenth century explore ‘resonances’ between coupled systems – music, the body, feelings, affect. See his essay ‘Organismusmetaphern’, in Musiktheorie, ed. Helga de la Motte-Haber and Oliver Schwab-Felisch (Laaber: Laaber-Verlag, 2005): 164. Judith Becker has adopted Maturana and Varela’s concept of ‘structural coupling’ in order to theorize phenomena such as rhythmic entrainment, trancing and music’s reinforcement of social bonds; see Becker, Deep Listeners: Music, Emotion, and Trancing (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004): 119–22.

67 Luhmann, Art as a Social System, trans. Eva M. Knodt (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000): 51.

68 Müller, Harro, ‘Luhmann’s Systems Theory as a Theory of Modernity’, New German Critique 61 (1994): 48–49 Google Scholar.

69 Müller, ‘Luhmann’s Systems Theory’, 47.

70 Luhmann, Social Systems, 37.

71 See Webster, James, ‘The Eighteenth Century as a Music-Historical Period?’, Eighteenth-Century Music 1 (2003): 47–60 Google Scholar.

72 See Gjerdingen, Robert, Music in the Galant Style (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007): 439 Google Scholar; see also Rosen, Charles, The Classical Style (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1972): 46–47 Google Scholar.

73 James Webster, ‘The Eighteenth Century’, 58.

74 The latter terms are employed by such authors as Roman Jakobson, Kofi Agawu and Richard Taruskin. See Taruskin’s elegant elucidation of the ‘Joke’ quartet in the Oxford History of Western Music, vol. 2: The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).

75 Chua, Absolute Music, 210.

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77 Chua, Absolute Music, 209.

78 Moeller, The Radical Luhmann, 22.

79 Thompson, Mind in Life, 38–9.

80 Luhmann, Art as a Social System, 204.

81 Luhmann, Art as a Social System, 53.

82 Wagner, Richard, ‘On Franz Liszt’s Symphonic Poems’, quoted in Carl Dahlhaus, The Idea of Absolute Music, trans. Roger Lustig (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989): 26 Google Scholar.