Entangled Network Space – The Fuzzy Space Where Music Is

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During this first year of my PhD research, I have been concentrating on a broad

literature review in order to establish the philosophical base on which to build my

ethnographic work with musicians over the next two years. Now, my opening slide

makes a pretty strong ontological and epistemological assertion as to the

whereabouts of music.

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Perhaps it would be good to bear this question in mind throughout what I have to

say.

Here are a musician, a computer and a musical work.

And, of course, they are easy to distinguish, one from another, aren’t they?

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After all, over evolutionary time, human beings have become rather adept at telling

things apart. If our ancestors couldn’t tell a tiger from a tree, we wouldn’t be here

today to philosophize on the matter. But is our familiarity with the discreteness of

things in our environment a little illusory? Does our phenomenological perception of

the world reveal the world as it really is? I will suggest to you that, in some respects,

the boundaries between apparently discrete objects are actually far more porous and

fuzzy than we would ordinarily think and that, in some cases, the very notion of a

boundary becomes meaningless.

When I started to read some of the philosophical writing on the ontology and

epistemology of musical works a number of years ago, it was then (and still is)

invariably written by scholars in the Anglo-American analytical philosophical tradition.

As someone who started his academic career in the sciences, this broadly

reductionist approach to the subject seemed normal, familiar and fairly attractive.

But the deeper I delved, the further removed from my everyday experience of music

such explanations seemed to be. It was as if the musico-philosophical search for the

fundamentals of what makes music tick, music at a molecular level, if you will, would

lead, grail like to an all-encompassing explication of music’s place in the world and

its effects on us.

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These analytic discourses concentrate on molecular issues; debates about types

and tokens, Platonic eternal works, and ongoing philosophical spats, such as the

now thirty-year old disputation between Peter Kivy and Jerrold Levinson on whether

musical listeners are architechtonicists or concatenationists.1

Let me use a pictorial metaphor of the reductionist approach more generally; so

here’s a Schenkerian analysis of Bach which aims to molecularise the music. Not

too dissimilar an approach to the depiction of the nicotinic acid molecule below it.

But, it seems to me, the Schenkerian graph tells us as much about the sound and

phenomenological aspects of the Bach organ prelude as does the organic

molecule’s representation about the effects of vitamin deficiency and diet. Which is

to say, not very much at all!

These are debates about angels on pinheads and far removed from the issues which

concern me as a musical listener.

1 See, e.g., Levinson 2015 and Kivy 2001

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[Photo credit © Babette Babich]

Roger Scruton sometimes puzzles me. Here he is, and, yes, that’s me in the

background looking puzzled.

Here’s what he says in The Aesthetics of Music.

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“It is important to distinguish the meaning of a work of art from its associations. We

do not always do this, since we are not always concerned to distinguish the meaning

of a work from its meaning for me. Nevertheless, to say that a work of music is

associated for me with certain feelings, experiences, memories, etc., is to say

nothing about its musical character. (1997: 145)”

He doesn’t actually go so far as to accuse the ‘associative listener’ of Philistinism,

but the tenor of the remark seems clear to me. But is he right when he asserts that

music’s associations “say nothing about its musical character”? I find it hard to get

beyond ‘meaning for me’.

Perhaps the root of the problem for me is what Christopher Small calls the

“reification” of music. He points out that music as a noun doesn’t reflect most

peoples’ actual engagement with music. Most people treat music as a verb – which

is why Small uses the phrase “musicking” and the verb “to music”. He values what

music does over what it is. That is to say, he makes music’s ontology supervenient

upon its epistemology. He says, “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 (1998: 13).” Bear in mind that this was written in 1998, in the

infancy of the internet. His definition of “place” would have far wider bounds

nowadays.

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He says, “… if we think about music primarily as action rather than as thing and

about the action as concerned with relationships, then we see that whatever

meaning a musical work has lies in the relationships that are brought into existence

when the piece is performed (1998: 138).”

Small is right here, as far as he goes, but in using the phrase “when the piece is

performed” he is giving emphasis to the near-synchronous relationship and

connections surrounding a ‘performance’. I’ll talk a bit later about Ian Hodder’s view

of the importance of diachronic connections and entanglements which link the past,

the now and the future.

Is Small justified in placing what music does before what it is? Well, it has been the

standard argument in Anglo-American philosophical thought since at least Quine in

1950 that ontology is supervenient on epistemology. What does that mean? It

means that if it epistemologically waddles like a duck and quacks like a duck,

ontologically, it’s a duck! And so it is with music; and looking at it this way around,

music becomes defined in virtue of its epistemological activities and associations.

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There are philosophers whose writings are more amenable to this connectionist

world view. They are mainly writers in what has come to be called the “Continental”

tradition.

As I started to undertake my literature review it became obvious that I needed to take

sides in this philosophical debate. Analytic or continental? The continental writers

provide a better framework for consideration of music’s multifarious links into the

world and so it is on that continental side of the fence (or Channel?) that I stand. To

make a compelling case against the analytical traditional approach to music’s

ontology and aesthetics would require a critique of about 90% of the Stanford

Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and so, I simply state that my approach will be

continental.

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Some of these writers are: Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Ian

Hodder (actually an archaeologist), Bruno Latour, Christopher Vitale and Manuel De

Landa.

What sort of world do these writers describe? They describe a space of possibilities,

potentialities and actualities. A space of solidity but also of flux. A space of the

tangible and corporeal but also of the intangible and incorporeal. Sometimes a space

of metaphors.

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Do not adjust your set! Here is a visual metaphor for what Deleuze and Guattari

would call “rhizomal space”. With the exception of Derrida, all of the writers I have

just mentioned are, to a greater or lesser degree, in the debt of Deleuze and Guattari

in their descriptions of the world. What they all stress in their metaphysical positions

is the importance of connections between things.

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Assemblage is a term common to most of these writers, certainly Deleuze and

Guattari, De Landa, Latour, Vitale and Hodder all use it. What does it mean?

One explanation is that everything occupies a node in a network of other things.

What a thing is and what it means is determined by the number of external (and

internal) connections it has. The mathematicians would say that its ‘whatness’ or

‘quiddity’ increases with an increase in its valency. Networks and connections are

everywhere. We use spatial metaphors to describe them.

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Here are some nodes and connections…

Here are some more…

An assemblage need not be a physical ‘object’ whose components are all in one

small physical locus.

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Deleuze and Guattari use the metaphor of a rhizome to describe the undifferentiated

space from which things ‘condense’ (my word) and connect (their word). A rhizome

in botanical terms is the undifferentiated root of a plant structure, which is

homogenous, with no one part of it privileged in terms of its structure or its potential.

This is a suitable metaphor for Deleuzo-Guattarian space, a space which they call

the Plane of Consistency or the Plane of Immanence. Manuel De Landa calls this

immanent space “possibility space”

This might look like neuronal tissue in the brain, but it is, in fact, a fungal mycelium,

rhizomatic tissue of the underground part of a mushroom. The mycelium is a good

metaphor for Deleuze’s Plane of Immanence.

“The rhizome conceives how every thing and every body – all aspects of concrete,

abstract and virtual entities and activities – can be seen as multiple in their

interrelational movements with other things and bodies (Colman 2010: 233).”

In short, we are what we are, and things are what they are, in virtue of our

connections internal and external. Without connections, there is nothing.

WS Gilbert says in Pinafore, “Things are seldom what they seem”. One aspect of

the connections which construct assemblages is the dynamic nature of the

processes. True, some of the dynamism is on such a vast scale and over such long

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periods, or is so small and quick that it is imperceptible to our everyday experiences.

Think of mountain building on one hand and radioactive decay on the other. But

dynamic processes they are, nonetheless. Deleuze and Guattari describe these

processes in fairly obscurantist language as “becomings” and as “deterritorialisation”

and “reterritorialization”. What do they mean by this?

Their famous example (well famous in continental philosophical circles, at any rate)

is the example of the wasp and the orchid. At the moment of feeding and pollination

(upon which this particular kind of wasp and the orchid are mutually dependent) they

say that the wasp is a “becoming orchid” and that the orchid is a “becoming wasp”.

The wasp/orchid assemblage, for that brief encounter, is more important than its

subcomponents.2

2 See, e.g., Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 11 et seq.

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[This slide is accompanied by a sound clip of a Bach ’cello sonata]

Deleuze and Guattari would describe this assemblage in terms of Du Pré “becoming

‘cello”, of the Bach suite “becoming Du Pré”, Du Pré “becoming Bach suite” and so

on and on.

Because the rhizomal space is boundless and subject to constant flux, the only

operative grammar is the constant conjunctive process ‘and… and… and…’ The

verb ‘to be’ has no place here. As EM Forster said, “only connect”.

I have been trying to explain this philosophy, so far, in terms of the connections and

entanglements between ‘things’. But are ‘things’ as distinct as we usually suppose?

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Bart Kosko says, “At the core is the paradigm shift from the black and white to the

gray – from bivalence to multivalence (1994: xvi).” “Words stand for sets. The word

house stands for different houses for each of us because we each have seen and

lived in and read about and dreamed about different houses. We all speak and write

the same words but we do not think the same words. Words are public but the sets

we learn are private. And we think in sets (1994: 122).”

This takes us back to Scruton’s point about associations. Would he really have us

believe that our individual experiences of houses tell us nothing about the

“houseness” of houses? Does my experience of and associations with, say

Beethoven 5, really tell me nothing about the symphony’s “musical character”?

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Three writers who tackle the issues raised by these indeterminacies are Jacques

Derrida, in Parergon, an essay discussing the frame of artworks and Andy Clark and

David Chalmers in their article, The Extended Mind, which deals with the locus of our

cognitive processes.

Taking Derrida first: his discussion is mainly about sculpture and painting, but much

of what he says about the plastic arts seems to have relevance to temporally

extended artworks, like music.

He says, “We must know of what we speak, what concerns the value of beauty

intrinsically and what remains external to our immanent sense of it. This permanent

demand - to distinguish between the internal or proper meaning and the

circumstances of the object in question - organizes every philosophic discourse on

art, the meaning of art and meaning itself, from Plato to Hegel, Husserl, and

Heidegger [and, we might add Scruton]. It presupposes a discourse on the limit

between the inside and the outside of the art object, in this case a discourse on the

frame. Where do we find it? (1979: 12)”

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Derrida’s essay is itself a critique of Kant’s Critique of Judgement. He describes the

case of drapery on a sculpture or the architectural colonnades on a palace or the fine

gilt frame around a painting. Where, he asks, do the artworks end and the frames

begin? Where is the work or “ergon” and what is external or “parergonal”? It is a

tricky question. Howard Hodgkin subverts the nature of a frame in his paintings.

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Where is the frame in this work?

Where is the frame or boundary of a musical work?

Here, with the score?

Perhaps there’s a frame when you book a ticket.

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Or is it the walls of the concert hall?

The album cover certainly frames the musical contents, doesn’t it?

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Or is it the concert review?

Or here?

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Or, at the risk of labouring the point, here?

So much for the boundary conditions of something intangible, like the musical work.

Where does the boundary lie as between us as persons and our tools, artefacts and

the wider world?

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In their 1998 paper, The Extended Mind3, Clark and Chalmers4 postulate that, as

modern human beings, we have offloaded some of our cognitive capacities and

functions to artefacts external to our brains. That is to say, some aspects of our

cognition are now extra-cranial. Back in 1998, they gave as their example the case

of someone called Otto and his Filofax. Otto, who is suffering from memory loss,

uses his annotated Filofax to find his way to, for example, the Museum of Modern

Art. Clark and Chalmers have had their critics. Their main defence is that extra-

cranial devices (such as notebooks, mobile phones, and computers) form couplings

(i.e., assemblages) with cognitive systems (the brain) which incorporate them into

one single cognitive system (Clark in Menary 2010: 84). But why should this

surprise us?

In these terms, humans have been using extra-cranial artefacts as component parts

of cognitive processes since the dawn of time.

3 See Clark and Chalmers in Menary (ed.) 2010: 27-42

4 Who would balk at being described with the Continental philosophers. But since what they describe

is an assemblage, I have no qualms in recruiting them in this Deleuzian description.

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In Clark’s terms, we are all cognitive cyborgs, natural born. If I ask you whether you

“know” a friend’s phone number, you may reply, “Yes”.

But do you? Perhaps you say that you know the way to Milton Keynes.

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But do you?

Surely you know what music you like and what’s in your collection.

Are you sure?

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So a similar question to that which I posed concerning the boundaries of artworks

also arises in the case of us as persons. Where are our boundaries?

There is a word in classical Greek, “prosopon” (πρόσωπον). It was used by early

commentators on the Gospels to signify aspects of the true nature of God as

represented by the Trinity. For example, “The prosopon of the Father is the Logos,

by whom God is made visible and manifest (Clement of Alexandria’s Paedagogus

quoted in Grillmeier 1975, 135).” Other meanings are; person, face, visage,

countenance, appearance, mask, part in a drama, and character. In one sense it

might mean the true limit or boundary of a person. We might argue that it covers

similar cases to those I have mentioned; the person/technology symbiont or cyborg.

Prosopon is the true nature and boundary of the cyborg.

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In a like fashion to Derrida’s use of the Greek ‘parergon’ to denote that which is

external to the work (1979), I propose the neologism ‘paraprosopon’

(παραπρόσωπον) to denote that which is external to the true nature (or boundary) of

the person. And if the prosopon is everything which constitutes an individual person

(which might include, counter-intuitively, technology or even other persons) so

paraprosopon is everything outwith those components. Just as with Derrida’s

par/ergon, it’s the nature and ‘location’ of the boundary that I’m interested

in. Technology pushes that boundary all the time and it is also quite fuzzy. So, just

as with Wittgenstein’s claim that in order to draw a limit to thinking we should need to

think both sides of it (1961, 3), then for us to define the extent or limit of a person, we

need to know what’s in and what’s out – which is tricky. Hodder says, “Like any

other thing, the human frame is a transient bounded entity through which matter,

energy and information flow, connecting it to other things (2012, 219).” Perhaps

‘countenance’ just is that boundary or metaphorical ‘surface’ of the prosopon. The

trouble lies in pinning it down.

Ian Hodder is an archaeologist, and he brings an archaeological perspective to bear

on consideration of assemblages involving humans and things. His thesis may be

summarised by saying that over evolutionary time, humans have come to depend

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upon things (and vice versa) more and more, so that we are now entangled to such

an extent that we (humans and things) are mutually entrapped. He says, “We often

manage to live relatively unaware of the full complexity of what and who provides for

us, but we are nevertheless deeply entangled in the vitality of things and the

assemblages of their relations (Hodder 2014: 21).” And later, “…as humans we are

involved in a dance with things that cannot be stopped, since we are only human

through things (ibid., 2014: 34).”

To summarise then:

There is an immanent possibility space in which things, actual and virtual form

and re-form into assemblages.

This process is dynamic.

Assemblages are indeterminate and fuzzy in virtue of this dynamism.

There are some dependencies between assemblages which amount to

entanglements.

We may call this Entangled Network Space.

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I started by suggesting that the world is not as discrete as these images and our own

beliefs about it would suggest. If my description of Entangled Network Space is

right, then the world is structured, metaphorically, more like this.

[This slide is a short movie clip. See here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yj1O6IcoZAU&feature=youtu.be]

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Bibliography

Clark, A. 2003. Natural-Born Cyborgs. New York NY: Oxford University Press

Clark, A. in Menary (ed.) 2010 The Extended Mind. Cambridge MA: MIT Press

Clark, A. and D. Chalmers in Menary (ed.) 2010 The Extended Mind. Cambridge

MA: MIT Press

Colman, F.J. in Parr, A (ed.) 2010. The Deleuze Dictionary. Edinburgh: Edinburgh

University Press

Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari 1987 (2011). A Thousand Plateaus (trans. Massumi,

B.) London: Continuum

Derrida, J. 1979. “Parergon” in October, Vol 9 (Summer 1979) 3-41

Grillmeier, A. 1975. Christ in Christian Tradition. Atlanta: John Knox Press.

Hodder, I. 2014. “The Entanglements of Humans and Things: A Long-Term View” in

New Literary History, Vol 45, Number 1, (Winter 2014) 19-36

Kivy, P. 2001. New Essays on Musical Understanding. Oxford: Oxford University

Press

Kosko, B. 1994. Fuzzy Thinking. London: Flamingo

Levinson, J. 2015. Musical Concerns. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Livesey, G. in Parr, A (ed.) 2010. The Deleuze Dictionary. Edinburgh: Edinburgh

University Press

Scruton, R. 1997. The Aesthetics of Music. Oxford: Clarendon Press

Small, C. 1998. Musicking. Middletown CT: Weslyan University Press

Wittgenstein, L. 1989 (1921). Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus . London: Routledge

& Kegan Paul.