Empire of Dirt - Wendy Fonarow Music Culture

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cuts to the shocked and elated reaction of the male character and then returns to linger on the woman. In this short segment, we can see the articulation of the spectator position as male, viewing a female undressing. The male, shown first, is passive. However, the female enters and disrobes, becoming the object of not only the male character’s active gaze but the audience’s as well. That is, the two gazes blend in the camera’s “look” at the female character. In the process, the audience has been placed in a similar viewing position as the male character who watches and reacts to a woman undressing. Thus, spectatorship refers not to the perspective of an individual in the audience but rather to a structural subjectivity articulated by a work in relation to its audience.

      Research on spectatorship has demonstrated that this subjectivity can be inscribed by various social categories. As Donna Haraway notes in her introduction to Primate Visions, “The themes of race, sexuality, gender, nation, family, and class have been written into the body of nature in Western life sciences since the eighteenth century” (Haraway 1989: 1). Yet in the copious discussions of spectorial inscriptions across different disciplines, there is a major omission: metaphysic inscriptions have been left largely unexamined and unmarked. But to imagine that religious ideology would not also be inscribed in spectorial positions is almost inconceivable when so many of our tacitly held assumptions about the nature of the world and our place in it have their foundations in religious philosophy.4 Perhaps this oversight is due to the fact that the religious foundations of Western thought are so ingrained that they are treated as utterly transparent by Western scholars. If anthropologists studying another culture ignored the religio-ideologic narratives that underlie social institutions, it would be considered a significant oversight. Yet in our own culture we are loathe to recognize or discuss them. The mind/body split that pervades Western scholarship is a fundamental dichotomy that emerges from a Western religious tradition. Franz Boas, Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, Talcott Parsons, and Edward Evans-Pritchard, key figures in the development of anthropological theory, have all discussed how metaphysic ideology pervades cultural institutions and practices. Yet critical theory and spectatorship studies remain decidedly averse to ascribing religious ideology to Western subjectivity. In large part, this book works to correct this omission and constitutes an examination of the metaphysics of spectorial embodiments.

      One of the limitations of the scholarship devoted to spectatorship is that it examines a common receptive context and makes generalizations from this context. Spectatorship has generally been examined in settings of passive comportment, such as cinema. Western cinematic norms require audience members to maintain a controlled, contemplative bodily composure during the experience of the film. However, this is by no means essential to film viewing. The norms of the bodily comportment of film audiences vary between and within cultures. In India, audiences are much more proactive and kinetically involved. Audience members wander around, stand up and yell at the screen, or engage in public dialogue with fellow audience members.5 This Western emphasis on contemplative and composed comportment extends to the experience of other artistic productions and settings, such as museums or symphonic concerts. It is far easier to ignore a still body in silent contemplation than it is to ignore a body engaged in vigorous physical and verbal activity. Thus, the majority of the examinations of spectatorship have been devoted to the intrinsic and internal relationships of film or literature as they inscribe subjectivity, rather than to what audience members actually do while interacting with these artistic productions. As Janice Radway has noted, these formulations have kept the media text, rather than the audience’s use of it, as the primary object of inquiry (Radway 1984). By examining events and narratives in which the audience or viewer is physically passive, spectatorship studies have overlooked the significance of comportment and its role in the production of audience subjectivity.

      Spectatorship occurs and develops in activities such as storytelling, television watching, cinema going, and concert attending. Theories of spectatorship that attempt to explain the structure and content of a particular medium must take into account actual practice. This is a notion of “participatory” spectatorship. In his article “Professional Vision,” Charles Goodwin shows how an individual becomes trained to apprehend and interpret events while engaging in professional activity (Goodwin 1994). For cinema studies, it is important to consider how the viewing subject is physically situated; for music performances, it is important to consider whether the viewing subject stands or sits, dances or is motionless, or is near to or far from his peers. Participant structure is a necessary component of spectatorship studies, because the experience of an event is constituted by the cultural production on display and its participant structure.

      The idea that the experience of music is located in activity is central to Christopher Small’s work, in which he considers music not only as sounds but as the setting, behaviors, and comportment of performers and audience members. Small reframes music from a noun into a verb, taking advantage of the useful term musicking. Musicking is the activity of music in a specific cultural context, from production to consumption in its particular social spaces. Small writes:

      To music is to take part in any capacity, in a musical performance, whether by performing, by listening, by rehearsing, or practicing, by providing material for performance (what is called composing), or by dancing. We might at times even extend its meaning to what the person is doing who takes the tickets at the door or the hefty men who shift the piano and the drums or the roadies who set up the instruments and carry out the sound checks or the cleaners who clean up after everyone else has gone. They too are all contributing to the nature of the event that is a musical performance. (Small 1998: 9)

      Small sees the meaning of musicking as located in the relationships manifested in and articulated by the production of culturally meaningful sounds, in specific cultural settings, and in the relationships of participants in the ritual event of music performance:

      The 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. They are to be found not only between those organized sounds which are conventionally thought of as being the stuff of musical meaning, but also between the people who are taking part, in whatever capacity, in the performance; and they model, or stand as metaphor for, ideal relationships as the participants in the performance imagine them to be: relationships between person and person, between individual and society, between humanity and the natural world and even perhaps the supernatural world. (Small 1998: 13)

      Small’s dissatisfaction with symphonic musical performance, as opposed to symphonic music, relates in part to the requirements for a high degree of body control and the limited physical responses allowed in the modern/postmodern symphonic concert participant structure. In his book Music of the Common Tongue, he contrasts the modern symphonic performance code to West African–influenced music forms, in which the line between performer and audience is often so blurred that the division appears arbitrary and irrelevant (Small 1987). Improvisational performances respond to the contingencies of the occasion—the particular individuals present, the artistic motifs introduced by the musicians, the dances of the dancers, and the verbal and sonic interjections of the “audience.” This produces a musical experience where all present are active co-producers of an aesthetic experience. Small clearly recognizes the importance of participatory spectatorship, which significantly impacts subjective experience in musical performances.

      The indie music performance offers a prime opportunity for examining participatory spectatorship. It is an explicitly receptive context, where the audience plays a conspicuous role in the construction of the event. Unlike cinema or symphonic audiences, indie music audiences have very different norms for bodily comportment. Indie audience behavior is often intensively active and dynamic. At indie music performances, the social space near the front of the stage is characterized by a high degree of direct contact between strangers and, at times, by spirited activity. Indeed, for a portion of the audience, the music performance is a physically taxing experience. However, not all audience members participate in vigorous activity. Some use a mode of comportment similar to that of cinematic audiences; that is, they are physically circumspect and interiorly oriented. For indie music performances, the situated use of the body by audience members entails

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