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Closing thoughts (not forgetting politics)

Closing thoughts (not forgetting politics). David Clarke International Conference on Music and Consciousness University of Sheffield, 19 July 2006. Dennett on the ‘web of discourses’.

shoshana-klein
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Closing thoughts (not forgetting politics)

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  1. Closing thoughts (not forgetting politics) David Clarke International Conference on Music and Consciousness University of Sheffield, 19 July 2006

  2. Dennett on the ‘web of discourses’ Each normal individual of this species [Homo sapiens] makes a self. Out of its brain it spins a web of words and deeds, and like other creatures, it doesn’t have to know what it’s doing; it just does it. This ‘web of discourses’ … is as much a biological product as any of the other constructions to be found in the animal world. Stripped of it, an individual human being is as incomplete as a bird without its feathers, a turtle without its shell. Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained, 416

  3. Implications of Dennett’s statement • (Interesting deconstruction of biology and culture) • Our sense of a conscious self coterminous with process of spinning webs of discourse • of which music is one • Of which Consciousness Studies is another • i.e. not conducted from neutral space outside the web. • NB on Dennett’s view, discourse emerges out of inner pandemonium(!) - cf. discursive chaos of music-and-consciousness community

  4. On defining ‘consciousness’ in a multidisciplinary context • Can we ever agree on a definition? • Better to make a virtue of not trying to? • Definition necessary within disciplines, but problematic (indeed ideological) to impose agreement between them. • A radical alternative to ‘defining’ consciousness on a multidisciplinary level: • Treat ‘consciousness’ as a signifier.

  5. Some thoughts after Žižek (in The Sublime Object of Ideology) • Žižek on the signifier ‘democracy’: • Meaning varies according to ideological framework, e.g. • liberal • socialist • communist • So too, by analogy, for ‘consciousness’

  6. What if we considered ‘consciousness’ not as being saturated with meaning, but as … • an empty signifier - not defined by positive content. • in ‘proto-ideological’ no man’s land: • part of array of ‘non bound’ signifiers in free-floating discursive network • until (in a second moment) these are fixed in an ideological field around a ‘nodal point’ or point de capiton (Lacan)

  7. ‘What is at stake in the ideological struggle is which of the “nodal points” … will totalize, include in its series of equivalences, these free-floating elements.’ Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 88.

  8. Each discipline will stitch ‘consciousness’ into its own different discursive quilt • Each a different ideological field • Plural (probably incommensurable) definitions • Leads to multidisciplinary culture defined by …

  9. A(nta)gonism • Contesting of views around the signifier ‘consciousness’ • Potential human benefit (learning to negotiate between epistemes) • Dialogic: • may be some convergence(s); or • we may come out of encounters with our views changed • We may find we no longer need the term (and so we move on to the next historical moment)

  10. More political issues: • Ideological assumption of ‘abstract’ (or ‘neutral’) consciousness • Is ‘personal’ consciousness possible? • (cf. ‘locked-in’ syndrome) • Or is consciousness always public / shared? • or at least mediated by cultural discourses

  11. The ‘hard’ questions • Does consciousness studies need music studies? • Does music studies need consciousness studies? • (Can the questions be answered separately?)

  12. Some possible inputs from music • Possible corrective to fixation on static visual metaphors in much of consciousness studies • understanding of how we process music in time (diachronically) could provide metaphors for processes of conscious self in time. • Qualia • something other than the colour red! • musical versions of ‘what Mary knows’?

  13. Pandemonium • ‘The idea has been around for several years that human consciousness might then be the activity of some sort of serial virtual machine implemented on the parallel hardware of the brain’. (Dennett, Consciousness Explained, 258-9) • Music (and other time-based utterances) provide different constructions of this phenomenon • ‘different’ in sense of both ‘other’ and ‘variable’

  14. Further issues • Unconsciousness • again contested definitions • ??? • The future?

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