The Listening Workshop is pleased to present the following event on Friday 13 December:
James Currie: 'Listening and the Limits of Understanding: Lacanian Reflections on Said's Late Style'
When dealing with an intellectual figure as widely read as Edward Said, our main difficulty is not one of trying to work out what his work means, but rather of how to make ourselves productively deaf to the richness of meanings we already possess. His work confronts us with an interesting, and far from uncommon interpretive challenge: of how to attain the necessary condition of being lost, when a terrain is already too well mapped out. The problem is one that is fundamental to the clinical practice of psychoanalysis, where the patients' own assumed meanings have to be unwoven through a process of the analyst's repeated refusal to understand what the patient assumes to be self-evident-a process that in the Lacanian tradition, at least, happens not through attempts by the analyst to understand better, but through an increased focus on listening (a veritable idee fixe of Lacan's). Taking my cue from Lacanian clinical practice, this paper will make inroads towards the formulation of a critical listening (as opposed to critical understanding) through examination of the case study offered by Said's late work, including (somewhat self-reflexively) his own work on late style. Because Said's projects here were, by definition, constituitively incomplete-Said having died before the full implications of where his lines of thought were leading him could be made fully conscious theoretically-we are, as in the scene of psychoanalysis, dealing with the pressures, forces, and tendencies that are starting to bend the identifying features of a discourse. With regard to Said, per se, my claim is that when we listen to him we can start to hear a world beyond the humanistic givens to which he had been, and to which he himself had, aligned: an unfinished symphony, a post-humanist Said.
James Currie, a writer and performer, is an Associate Professor teaching music history and philosophy courses at the University at Buffalo (State University of New York). His work, which has appeared in a variety of disciplinary forums, has been concerned with investigating the complex and necessary limits dividing music, politics and the social (see for instance Music and the Politics of Negation (Indiana, 2012) and "Music after all" (Journal of the American Musicological Society 2009)). In recent work, he is moving, via an investigation into comedy, towards the formulation of a musical pragmatics. The aim is to surpass the present scholarly insistence on discussing music's participation in politics and the social to ask, rather, how the social and political complexities of where we now find ourselves might necessitate our own participation in what could be called musical life. The tentative title of this new work is "On Sonic Gravity: Musical Life in Comic Modernity."
Friday 13 December, 2pm
11 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3RF.
Chaired by Professor Rachel Beckles Willson, Director of the Humanities and Arts Research Centre at Royal Holloway For further details please write to [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
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