Microsoft Word - Ritchey typeset 2 Current Musicology 108 (Spring 2021) ©2021 Ritchey. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons-Attribution-Non- Commercial-NoDerivatives License (CC BY-NC-ND). 26 Marianna Ritchey In 1835, Théophile Gautier published his sensational novel Mademoiselle de Maupin, the story of a cross-dressing, swashbuckling lady knight who falls in love with both a man and a woman before riding a horse into the sunset while both of her lovers weep.1 Among his many other exploits, the publication of Maupin helped turn Gautier into one of French Romanticism’s most-caricatured bohemian artists; however, the book’s most lasting impact had less to do with its wild plot or its author’s scandalous reputation than with its preface, a 14,000 word manifesto about the purpose of art. Much of the manifesto takes the form of a hilarious screed against the art critics who constantly belittled Gautier and his friends.2 Gautier calls these critics “moralists” and “utilitarians,” and parodies the way they write about art: What purpose does this book serve? […] What! Not a word of the needs of society, nothing about civilization and progress? How can a man, instead of making the great synthesis of humanity, and pursuing the regenerating and providential idea through the events of history, how can he write novels and poems which lead to nothing, and do not advance our generation on the path of the future? Calling such critics “goitrous cretins,” Gautier insists that art is not like a railway or a plumbing system or any of the other innovations that “advance humanity on its path of progress.” He refuses to value art according to its usefulness— what’s so great about usefulness anyway? “To begin with,” he writes, “it is not very useful that we are on the earth and alive.” From this basic existential observation, he pushes the logic of utilitarianism to its most absurd conclusion, noting that “some soup and a piece of meat twice a day,” and “a hollow cube measuring seven or eight feet every way, with a hole to breathe through,” are all we strictly require to maintain our material existence, which seems to be all the utilitarian critics care about. His preface attempts to dismantle the notion that art should be useful, emphasizing that arts very purposelessness is what makes it great, and the fact that we spend so much time involved in such purposeless production is what gives life meaning. “To prevent one’s self from dying is not living,” he notes, “and I do not see in what respect a town organized after the 27 utilitarian fashion would be more agreeable to dwell in than the cemetery of Père-la-Chaise” (Gautier, 16). Though he was often ridiculed in the mainstream press, Gautier’s manifesto played a role in spreading the Romantic value of l’art pour l’art, or “art for art’s sake.” This ideal can be seen in the ideas of artistic autonomy and “absolute” music that music theorists like E.T.A. Hoffmann (1813) and, later, Eduard Hanslick (1854) developed in their efforts to distinguish certain kinds of music from music made for the marketplace or for conventional social purposes like dancing or telling stories. For such theorists, what is most interesting and powerful about music is found in its formal structure, and thus the more a piece of music turns inward and explores only its own internal structural logic, the better it is. This “autonomous ideal” became one of the foundational values of European and American musicology; and indeed, in many respects, these nineteenth-century ideas became what “art,” including “art music,” is. Not only does musical autonomy undergird musicology’s disciplinary tools and assumptions, but, more importantly, the critique and rejection of autonomy was also the basis of some of the past few decades’ most influential musicological interventions. In fact, today, as I will show, art for art’s sake is dismissed by almost everyone: both leftists and liberals tend to scorn it; both activists and academics reject it; even artists themselves sometimes lambast the idea. In this article, however, I try to reappraise the autonomous ideal. In doing so, I draw on work from a wide variety of fields. I engage contemporary musicologists who in various ways are challenging our fundamental assumptions and orientations, not only about music but also about what it means to be a person and how people relate to one another in collectives. I also bring into the dialogue voices from political theory and political economy, as well as anthropology, sociology, feminist theory and Black studies. In addition to drawing together myriad streams of academic thought, I engage with the ideas of radical activists whose practices and philosophies develop outside of any institutional framework. My exploration is thus philosophical and wide-ranging, as well as highly citational. This is by design. In keeping with the political orientation espoused throughout the article, it is important to me that I make visible the network of people whose ideas I am thinking through and with. The thread that unifies this diverse undertaking is my desire to develop a different political framework for conceiving music, society, and ourselves than the one that currently dominates our discourses, both in musicology and in mainstream social and political life in general. In short, I am interested in the political imaginary we inhabit, a term I use to indicate the means by which we create our 28 ways of being together as well as of representing that togetherness. My understanding of the political imaginary also foregrounds ideology, or the myriad assumptions and commonsense notions a given community deploys in constructing their understandings of themselves, their relations with one another, and, most importantly, their understandings of and orientations toward power. I am interested in the ways music—making it, listening to it, and thinking about it—might aid our collective ability to both clearly see the world as it is and imagine together ways it could be radically different. I will first briefly gloss the ways contemporary ideas about art and music from many different points on the political spectrum adhere to the utilitarian ethos that Gautier hated, and then explore some facets of our current political imaginary, which I envision as a liberal democratic one in which democratic ideals are increasingly secondary to liberal—which is also to say capitalist— prerogatives; then I will explore some ideas about individualism and difference, and how these can be envisioned differently within different political imaginaries. Finally, I will examine some of the perhaps contradictory ways in which certain kinds of uselessness might be considered politically useful, in freeing us to imagine a radically different world than the one we currently inhabit. The Mainstream Case for The Arts Just as Gautier’s hated critics did, contemporary advocates for art and music in the U.S. often assess value in terms of utility, whether they are arguing that the government should financially support the arts, or whether they are applying for grants from philanthropic foundations, or whether they are excitedly promoting the kind of entrepreneurship that can supposedly liberate art from both these funding models. For example, in a 27-page policy brief outlining talking points for explaining why the government should fund the arts, the National Assembly of State Art (2017) presents copious data demonstrating that the arts are “a good public sector investment” because they create jobs, produce tax revenue, and generate unique products; they help revitalize impoverished urban areas (a common euphemism for gentrification); and they teach children to be productive workers. Given the government’s concern with “strengthen[ing] America’s global position,” the brief concludes by noting that “incorporating the arts improves the impact of other state policies,” and it illustrates this fact with a quote from President Eisenhower, whose 1955 State of the Union address is sometimes cited as inaugurating the idea that the government should directly 29 support the arts because they are among the “activities which will make our civilization endure and flourish.” Without overly lingering on what is (or should be) an obvious point, it’s worth noting that America’s global projects tend to be sinister at best. In fact, just seven months before making his stirring speech about art, Eisenhower authorized the CIA to help overthrow the democratically elected government of Guatemala because it was threatening the profits of an American fruit corporation. This intervention led to decades of social upheaval, civil war, and a genocide of the Mayan people. It also inaugurated a wildly profitable new era of American foreign policy in which such brutal interventions became standard procedure for both Democratic and Republican administrations. The huge success of his Guatemala gamble was surely one of the national projects Eisenhower had in mind, when he spoke a few months later about how the arts play an important role in helping “our civilization endure and flourish.” I mention this to bring specificity to what is often an incredibly vague discursive strategy in arts advocacy, and to suggest that the easy linking of the arts to the health of America’s global imperialist project is something we should critically reflect on. And yet, perhaps it doesn’t matter much, because such government support began dying almost as soon as it was born. While some presidents have continued to tout the great potential for the arts to burnish America’s global profile (and indeed state-supported art and artists played an important role as “soft power” during the Cold War), since the 1970s the condition of federal arts funding has been a precarious and hotly politicized one. Certain kinds of cultural production continue to receive major governmental support—for example, the Department of Defense funnels millions of dollars into the production of pro- military movies and video games—but “high arts” like classical music are not particularly effective for military recruitment. Thus today, government support for these kinds of art manifests primarily in the U.S. tax code, which makes donations to “non-profit” arts organizations like opera houses and art museums tax-deductible, and thus incentivizes billionaire and corporate philanthropy. In this case, the continuing usefulness of art is clear; it remains very useful to billionaires and corporations as a tool for shoring up their public images and shielding them from paying taxes (INCITE! 2007). The value of utility also manifests, albeit in somewhat different terms, in the entrepreneurial discourses that have recently been transforming classical music practice in the U.S. The old state and philanthropic funding models for art music are no longer viable, these entrepreneurs say, and furthermore they are 30 socially irrelevant and elitist anyway. To counteract this moribund condition, art music needs to “enter the real world,” by becoming more adaptable to market conditions in order to widen audiences and increase revenues. Within this framework, music that doesn’t appeal widely across multiple fan bases—music like that of high modernism, which many entrepreneurial artists in the new music realm subject to particular scorn—is effectively useless (Ritchey 2019). The Liberal Political Imaginary These quick glosses demonstrate the liberal political imaginary out of which most mainstream art discourse—both within and outside the academy— emerges. Contemporary liberal democracy represents an uneasy combination of two quite different political traditions: democracy, which is ancient, and which foregrounds ideals of popular sovereignty and equality; and liberalism, which is much younger, and which emphasizes individual liberty and human rights. Within Western liberal democracies these concepts are often lumped together, but there are major semantical and political differences between popular sovereignty and individual liberty, or between equality and the extension of “rights” granted by the state and protected by laws. Political theorist Chantal Mouffe (2005) has explored the liberal-democratic political imaginary in detail.3 She demonstrates that within the contemporary formulation of this imaginary, democracy has been firmly rendered secondary to liberalism (this is why I use the term “liberal political imaginary” instead of “liberal-democratic political imaginary” throughout). Quoting Friedrich von Hayek, she argues that contemporary liberals see democracy as a “utilitarian device,” a tool that can be useful for safeguarding liberal institutions, but that should be discarded whenever it threatens these institutions. For example, popular democratic movements aimed at abolishing the police must be stamped out by any means necessary, not because police contribute to the public good but because policing protects private property rights, which are the foundational institution of liberal democracy (Davis 2003; Gilmore 2007; Williams 2015; Vitale 2018). Within this episteme, social problems are assessed and addressed via “rational,” data- driven/means-tested approaches, and human nature is seen as fundamentally self-serving and competitive, which is why free-market capitalism is the “natural” framework upon which a top-down representational government should organize society (this view of human nature also conveniently justifies the police and the carceral system). Mouffe also argues that within liberalism, democracy is seen as something bestowed from above, by the state, and that the 31 liberal political imagination is unable to conceive of “society” outside of this hierarchical relationship. Finally—and this hearkens back to Gautier’s critique— liberalism figures “value” primarily in economic terms. It is this “rationalist,” and essentially amoral, approach to calculating the value of things, people, policies, etc. that I am most interested in examining here. In mainstream arts advocacy, this abstracted, amoral perspective is often on display. As I’ve demonstrated, within arts discourse art is described as “useful” to society for the way it creates jobs, trains workers, produces tax revenue, or helps make America look good as it pursues its various global projects. In other words, art is “useful” because and insofar as it generates money or helps firms or the state gain economic advantage. Even within the newer stream of U.S. classical music that rhetorically foregrounds the need to “democratize” this music and to break free of stifling state and corporate sponsorship, the abstraction of capitalist value relations is apparent: here, “democratizing” music means making it attractive to more and more consumers, and music that doesn’t have many consumers (or, worst of all, that doesn’t want to accumulate many consumers) is by definition useless (and in being useless is self-evidently bad). Before moving on, I would like to touch on a final aspect of the way these discourses function, which is their abstraction of the concept of “art” itself. When people assert that “art is good for society,” which art do they mean, exactly? Scrolling through the copious articles demonstrating how and why art is good for us uncovers a huge trove of specific data on profitability and economic impact (examples of which I cited above), but remarkably few specifics about art works themselves. A Beethoven symphony, one of Yoko Ono’s instruction pieces, a Noname album, a fascist mural, Michelangelo’s David, a Neolithic cave painting, Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ,” are these all equivalently “good for society,” and good in the same ways? The answer can only be yes within the abstract notion of exchange value that undergirds liberalism generally. This same notion manifests, for example, in the liberal insistence that fascism and anti- fascism, or racism and anti-racism, are not irreconcilable contradictions but rather sets of opinions that are formally equal and that can (should) be resolved through rational debate in which “both sides” present their case and the best argument wins (Lalami 2019). This kind of equivalence ignores systemic and structural inequalities; it also speaks to the way “difference” is treated within liberal-dominant democracy, a point to which I will return. Théophile Gautier was proclaiming the value of uselessness during the period in which modern liberal capitalism had begun to dominate the world 32 stage (he was just seven years older than Karl Marx; they may even have met during Marx’s brief, heady sojourn in Paris). He was acutely aware of the ways this coalescing political imaginary was radically transforming how production worked, how society was organized, and how people and things were valued within that new society. His countrymen mocked him for valuing paintings more than railways, and it’s also true that he speaks from a place of privilege—only someone who had never gone barefoot in a Parisian winter could possibly proclaim, as he did, that he would rather have a poem than a pair of shoes. Still, I see his ode to uselessness as a concerted effort to imagine differently than the dominant thinking of his time permitted. He was trying to resist what he saw as the capitalist progressive project’s dehumanizing effects, effects that have become ever more glaring and drastic in the two intervening centuries since he wrote his manifesto. Other Imaginaries If, as I’ve suggested, contemporary mainstream art discourse is entwined with the utilitarian/bourgeois logic of state and capital, then what do self-identified anticapitalists and anti-statists think about art, in terms of its use value? There are myriad people and communities that aren’t remotely interested in any of the concerns just charted, because they operate via very different political imaginaries, for example many strands of radical leftism, the traditional consensus decision making that many indigenous communities practice, or horizontal communities that operate via doctrines of mutual aid. Music in such oppositional or revolutionary spaces serves many functions, including keeping morale up, building a sense of shared political goals, and circulating political messages; it can also be used as a weapon, as in the Stonewall riots, or the anti- gentrification protests in LA’s Boyle Heights, which often deploy mariachi bands. And yet when self-identified radical anticapitalists take part in serious debates about art and music, they tend to value these activities in utilitarian terms more or less similar to those of the liberals they otherwise despise. In such circles, art and music that doesn’t explicitly serve the revolution or the people in some concrete way is often seen as suspiciously frivolous, perhaps even complicit with capitalism and imperialism. One thinks here of the Marxist-Leninist doctrine of socialist realism, within which art must be representational and immediately accessible, and made with the explicit intention of encouraging the viewer to identify with the goals of revolutionary socialism. Today variations on this 33 attitude persist across the leftist spectrum, which is interesting, given these ideologies’ otherwise ferocious rejection of the logic of capital. However, the spirit of l’art pour l’art does live on, albeit in a surprising place: anarchism, the political ideology that is perhaps most diametrically opposed to liberalism. Anarchism agitates relentlessly against both capitalism and the state, and is concerned not only with class struggle but also with struggling inside our own heads to constantly root out modes of thinking, seeing, and relating to others that manifest the kind of hierarchy and domination that make capitalism possible. Errico Malatesta (1891) asserted that anarchism is not an administered system but rather a “method” individuals can apply to all facets of experience; similarly, Emma Goldman (1911, 41) wrote that anarchism is not a new political system but rather “a living force in the affairs of our life, constantly creating new conditions.” As literary theorist David Weir (1997) notes, anarchism is thus a fundamentally imaginative, experimental political ethos. The thought experiments its central tenets pose will and should be solved differently by different communities depending on context, conditions, and collective goals—and for this reason it is uniquely well suited to aesthetic experimentation. Furthermore, its rigorous refusal of all capitalist logics, and its embrace of the idea that people need both “bread and roses,” aligns anarchism with some of Gautier’s ideas about art within the capitalist progressive project. Examining the small amount of aesthetic theory that has been generated by self-identified anarchists reveals many statements that align with Gautier’s. In a recent collection of essays on anarchist aesthetics (McPhee and Reuland, 2007), for example, the anarchist printmaker Bec Young asks “who decides what is utilitarian and what is not?” and angrily continues, “are artists to turn into productive automatons, churning out works that function with so much utility? I might as well do graphic design for Ford” (110). And yet surprisingly, with few exceptions (for example the work of John Zerzan, which I address in my conclusion) usefulness is still invoked as the primary mode for valuing art. The collection opens with a battle cry against Gautier’s ethos: anarchist artists, the editors write, do want to resist “the idea that art can be boiled down to simple utility,” yet they are also staunchly opposed to the ideal of “art for art’s sake,” which they characterize as “pure aesthetics, unmoored from a societal context.” The editors go on to note that anarchism is the political ideology that seems the most open to artistic freedom, and assert that art can itself become “a utopian instance, prefiguring a world we want to live in.” And yet the end result of such art is still figured in terms of usefulness. As one editor notes in a later essay, “creating myths, complicating situations, getting the critical thinking process 34 started. These are all potentially useful things” (p. 110). In an interview with revered anarchist illustrator Clifford Harper, he takes an explicit stance regarding the usefulness of anarchist art, stating that art only has social value when it comes in the form of propaganda: artists have to “creatively explain to people exactly what anarchism is and exactly what we need to do to get there,” he says, emphasizing that for him this means representational art that communicates “the urgent necessity of an anarchist revolution” (p. 46). Particularly contentious in this discourse is art that is abstract, that lacks a participatory ethos, that fetishizes perfection, technique, and training, or that is otherwise seen as inaccessible to the masses. Such art becomes effectively useless when seen through the radically social orientation of an ideology like anarchism. It is thus no surprise that anarchists tend not to be interested in the kind of “art music” that musicology is often focused on. Stances like Harper’s are fierce and brave, and I am sympathetic to the kind of totalizing anger he articulates when he says: The whole art thing—artists, art works, art theorists, art critics, art galleries, art schools, art money, the whole dismal show, is so compromised, so hopelessly fucking with the state—fame, greed, wealth, prestige—that it’s best left to its own degradation […] For working people like me, it’s just another part of the show that has to end. (quoted in McPhee and Reuland, 45) At the same time, I feel strongly that the capitalist depravity of the art world does not necessarily mean that art must be obvious, didactic, and simple in order to be comprehensible to the mass of the working class. In the first place, a lot of what’s produced by the “high” art world is facile and obvious; more importantly, though, the belief that poor people can’t understand complex or abstract ideas is also a belief held by the ruling class, and is thus a problematic stance for radicals to espouse. Similarly, when musicologists criticize scholars or composers who value musical complexity, they often say this value is “elitist.” But such an assertion takes as a given that people without institutional educations can’t understand and don’t enjoy complexity, an implication that is itself elitist. To get out of this trap, we have to stop believing that interest in simplicity vs. complexity correlates to class. Additionally, I would argue that what’s “elitist” about “high art” isn’t necessarily its content, as so many people (including radicals like Clifford Harper) conventionally assume (this is also the assumption that allows so many young composers to brand their music as revolutionary or democratic simply because it is tonal or has a steady rhythm). A lot of the music in the Western art tradition does deploy varying degrees of abstraction and formal complexity that 35 may or may not render it “difficult” for some listeners, but it has also always been an emanation from the wealthy strata of society, which has surely played a role in alienating “the masses.” For radicals, this cultural history renders art like classical music not merely silly or alienating but even actively dangerous. As C. Wright Mills put it in a critique of Thorsten Veblen: prestige products like classical music don’t merely reveal the absurdity of the rich, as Veblen suggested, rather, “prestige buttresses power, turning it into authority, and protecting it from social challenge” (Veblen 1899, xvi). I would argue that the long and ongoing ideological history of certain artistic expressions being cultivated and circulated by and for elite prestige culture has more to do with the perception that such art is not “for” poor people than anything inherent to its content. It will be difficult to change this perception (as many of us claim to want) without more honestly reckoning with this ideological history. Musicology and Absolute Music I return now to the issue of musical autonomy. For several decades, many musicologists, wanting to contribute to the social good as well as to explain the relevance of our work to the public, have argued passionately against the “autonomous ideal” that music theorists from the nineteenth century to the modern era have deployed as a means of insisting that certain kinds of music transcend the tawdry social plane. In refusing this old-fashioned value, musicologists have insisted that music’s meaning is always socially constructed, that music can and should be thought of as political in various ways, and that, most importantly of all, musicology itself is and should be a field of inquiry that is self-consciously engaged in political work. James Currie (2008) pushes back against what he sees as the smugness of musicology’s impression of itself as political. He notes that for thirty years we have all simply been nodding our heads together in agreement that various shibboleths of the field—including perhaps most prominently the old notion of absolute music—are politically bad. Yet this self-satisfied group nodding is not actually critique, because it’s not actually a thoughtful grappling with ideas and contradictions. Rather it’s just an excuse to enjoy nodding and being seen to nod (or what today we might call “virtue signaling”). Currie’s argument is similar to the one I made above about arts advocacy—that musicology’s political frame is imbricated with that of liberal capitalism, which means that our discipline’s political lens is too impoverished and reactionary to do anything but violence on music when it tries to analyze it in politically-engaged ways. Thus, he suggests 36 that in order to preserve both music and musicology we should actually stop thinking of our work as political, and should revisit the idea that music, in addition to obviously having social meanings, might also actually be autonomous. By this he means that music isn’t just a code to crack (Miles 1995) in order to see all the things it’s showing us about material reality; it is also a thing itself, something that exceeds our ability to explain or fully know, and furthermore there is a powerful negating function inherent in this inscrutability, this capacity of music to “say no” to us (Currie 2012).4 I think we should pay attention to Currie’s critique of disciplinary groupthink, and I think his injunction that we need to critically engage with ourselves—our assumptions, our frames, the things we accept and reject out of hand—is vitally important to heed, not just as scholars but as people. As he puts it, if the discipline, and by extension, the whole world, is ever to change for the better, we must come to see “the image we present of ourselves to ourselves as wrong” (Currie 2008, 80). I also love his commitment to the belief that music— in its ephemerality, its invisibility, the way it acts upon us without our being able to fully explain why or how it does—evades us somehow, and that if we recognize, even embrace that we have been thwarted in this way, music can show us something (or at least prove to us that there is or could be something) radically different from what we think we already know. After all, “if we cannot see something other than ourselves, then we die” (Currie 2011, 552). Rather than suggesting we self-consciously retreat from politics, though, I believe we need to actively grapple, together, with what it means to be “political” in the first place, and that if we do so, we might one day be able to lay the foundation for a new musicological politics, one that might be to some degree productively opposed to capitalism in a way our field currently is not, and that thus might help us become oriented toward the envisioning and creation of a truly different world, rather than simply the upholding of the world as it already is. This is a contradictory and vexing thing to suggest, and the fact that it is rooted in a reappraisal of musical autonomy is more problematic still. After all, isn’t there something suspicious in the way the autonomous ideal seems to reject the social, the collective, in favor of a radically isolated individual freedom? This seems like what Adorno (1937, 1970) is saying, for example, when he talks about autonomous art as the safeguard of individualism. For Adorno, capitalist modernity militates so powerfully against the expression of any really individual thought or act that the authentic artist has no choice but to compose in a radically self-contained and increasingly illegible way, almost like the artist must actively 37 ward off any threat of connecting or communicating with others. If this is what autonomy is all about—as many musicologists and contemporary composers have seemed to believe—then indeed it doesn’t seem productively political, certainly not in the anarchist sense of the term. Difference In addressing these difficulties, I will take up one of the central preoccupations of contemporary musicology, indeed of contemporary liberal political discourse generally, which is difference. The dynamic between individuals and society raises ceaseless questions about difference. To what degree should individuals be allowed to be different, and how should their various differences be negotiated within a society? The answer to this question comprises a major aspect of any political imaginary. Within contemporary liberalism, difference is rhetorically celebrated, but is in reality a problem to be resolved—even eradicated—ideally through rational negotiation and compromise, but if necessary through the enforcement of laws. Within this frame, racial, cultural, and gendered differences are regulated by managerial “diversity and inclusion” practices within which, in Angela Davis’s words, “the purpose of acknowledging difference is to guarantee that the enterprise functions as efficiently as it would if there were no cultural differences at all” (Davis 1996, 45). Within the liberal framework, Davis notes, “although you are permitted to be an ‘other,’ you must work ‘as if’ you were not a member of a marginalized group.” Similarly, Chantal Mouffe describes the way liberalism takes “differences” as objective, perhaps even regrettable, facts of life, and then deals with them via procedures that are actually intended “to make those differences irrelevant and to relegate pluralism to the sphere of the private” (2005, 19). In private we can practice any religion or belief system we want, teach our children whatever we want, treat our bodies however we want, use whatever language we want, hold whatever opinions we want; in public we must all restrict our expressions of difference to only those deemed “reasonable” within liberal norms of decorum and productivity. This dichotomy generates unresolvable contradictions and impossibilities. The state requires our children to attend school in order for every child to receive a standardized education; what if we don’t want our children to be schooled to this standard, or schooled at all? Similarly, what if I teach my children that there is no such thing as private property? They will come into serious conflict with others and with the state, and will likely be arrested and incarcerated, because I have not taught them the proper submission to property and authority that within liberalism is deemed 38 “reasonable.” These types of contradictions in how liberal democracy negotiates difference constitute the “paradox” Mouffe diagnoses; this paradox is what must be addressed if democracy is ever to rise above its secondary position within the currently dominant political framework. Radical perspectives like Davis’s and Mouffe’s actually resonate with what Adorno thinks about difference in/and society, despite his longstanding reputation as an antisocial elitist. When we read him as antisocial, we are assuming that there is only one meaning of the word “society,” when obviously that isn’t true. When Adorno juxtaposes individual freedom against the oppression of society, he’s talking about this society, specifically, meaning Western liberal-democratic society, a society totally shot through by and infected with commodification and capitalist ideology, a society doomed to continually reproduce fascism.5 This society is bad for individuals, not “society” in general. Adorno is not antisocial, he is anticapitalist, and the fact that so many smart people have read him incorrectly on this point for so long is a marker of how invisible the particularities of capitalism have become in contemporary liberal understandings of what society is. In reality, as Fumi Okiji points out in a book-length dialogue with him, Adorno believed that individual freedom was absolutely contingent on social life and sociality. Precisely nailing down what Adorno means when he uses the word “individualism” reveals something far beyond “mere tolerance of difference” or “virtuous embrace of the best examples of multiculturalism” (2008, 8-9). Rather, for Adorno (as for Okiji), “true individualism…involves an awareness of the individual’s dependence on what it is not.” Individualism entails the radical recognition of real, even (sometimes perhaps especially) incommensurable differences between all individuals, and more importantly, the recognition that this difference is the grounds for collective development and change. In other words, “an individual cannot reach truth alone.” Okiji brilliantly explores the way this radically heterogenous collective individualism manifests in group improvisation, pursuing her arguments via a dialectical wrestling with Adorno’s critical thoughts on jazz. But if in reality individual freedom—including the individual’s ability to know and be themselves— is derived somehow from the community, what does that mean? In American political and ideological life, the collective and the individual are starkly opposed to one another. Here, the phrase “communal individualism” can appear only as an oxymoron, the absurd combination of two opposites, indeed two enemies. We envision an individual as someone who by nature wants to do whatever they selfishly want, and who is constrained from 39 doing so by the needs of society, within which the individual’s freedom must be restricted for the good of the whole. Sigmund Freud (1930) wrote an entire book about this supposed dynamic, in which he argued that society—civilization—has been obviously necessary for humanity’s survival yet it is also a prison so repressive that living inside of it forces us into mental illness and drug addiction.6 Within modern liberal capitalist societies, in particular, the individual is a problem for the collective, and vice versa. Many people both inside and outside the academy—some of whom I address below—have called for us to start answering the question of difference differently. They insist that the constant acknowledgement and negotiation of radical difference should be the point, the source of our collective strength, rather than something to be managed or erased; we should not be working toward a future world in which all real differences have been smoothed over and all antagonisms have been resolved via good management practices. In fact, such a goal is fascist. On the other hand, since difference is also not reducible to discrete, fixed identity categories, it can’t adequately be “celebrated” or “promoted” simply by raising individuals from marginalized identities into positions of power or prominence within existing systems. As bell hooks put it decades ago, as long as a group “defines liberation as gaining social equality with ruling class white men, they have a vested interest in the continued exploitation and oppression of others” (1984, 15). Becoming “equal” to a ruler means ruling over others, and this can never be part of any radical liberation politics, because it does nothing to alter the system of domination itself. Despite propaganda painting anarchism as a doctrine of selfishness and chaos, one of its core tenets entails recognizing and engaging radical difference as the source of all collective power. Anarchism insists that the individual and the collective are inextricably identified with and by one another, existing in a constant dialectic together that continually shapes and re-shapes communal visions of the world as it is and as it could be. Malatesta wrote that “solidarity” means “the freedom of each not being limited by, but complemented—indeed finding the necessary raison d’étre in—the freedom of others” (1891, 27). Cindy Milstein puts it in more detail: “No one is free unless everyone is free, and everyone can only be free if each person can individuate or actualize themselves in the most expansive of senses” (2010, 15). Milstein notes that this creates a “tension” between individuals trying to live together in collectivity, but rather than seeing this tension as dangerous or as something to be resolved via rationalist argument and/or legal enforcement, anarchists see it as the positive, perhaps even joyful, site from where genuinely new creative ideas and social 40 forms grow. There will always be an uneasiness between individual and collective freedom, but “this struggle is exactly where anarchism takes place.” Mouffe (2005, 18-19) similarly argues for a new version of democratic politics rooted in the collective embrace of real difference that includes the embrace of tensions and antagonisms, meaning a difference that isn’t just the aspiration to formal sameness presented to us by liberal diversity fantasies. She calls this reimagined form of democracy “agonistic pluralism.”7 Within this new commitment to pluralism, we would stop seeing difference as a difficult fact of life we have to grudgingly accept and figure out how to deal with (by reducing it or smoothing it over or insisting it can be placed in fixed identity boxes and managed that way), rather, the constant play of differences should be the entire point of democratic life, the source of all its joys and the foundation of its freedoms. Constantly working to acknowledge, understand, transform, or incorporate difference would become the engine driving social evolution; we would never stop learning about one another, which would mean we would never stop learning about ourselves, and becoming new ourselves in that process. These sorts of radical re- envisionings of democracy present a version of collectivity that insists on remaining heterogenous in more than a merely rhetorical or representational way, and that, in doing so, continually refuses to make itself legible to status quo systems of power and domination. In my own efforts to construct a different political imaginary along these lines, I have drawn on musicological work like Okiji’s, as well as on Rachel Mundy’s suggestion that we construct a version of humanistic inquiry that is able to take the experiences and subjectivities of other animals into account. Okiji demonstrates that within the liberal philosophical tradition, understandings of freedom and individualism, and of what “human” means, developed out of the growing need to manage racial difference, or, in other words, to morally justify African chattel slavery and colonialism. Recognizing this moral (or rather immoral) foundation for many of the philosophical categories we take for granted means challenging those categories, and coming up with genuinely new ways of conceptualizing ideas like individualism, humanity, freedom. Meanwhile Rachel Mundy reveals the way the ethical framework of humanistic differencing—for example, the distinguishing of “nature” from “culture,” and “the human” from “the animal”—has constituted an “unsustainable divide” that can’t be resolved without “simultaneously addressing the question of how difference has been historically constructed in the twentieth century” (Mundy 2018, 9). These are lessons I take with me in my own attempts to understand, 41 and turn towards, real difference, both in my academic work and in my life outside the academy. Refusal As I have shown throughout this article, many thinkers—both within and outside of musicology—offer us pathways toward transforming our understandings of individualism and collectivity. As has perhaps now become clear, what all of this work has in common is a shared commitment to refusal of some sort. Okiji (55) for example joins Adorno in calling for us to “refuse participation in the upkeep of a fabricated world,” while Mundy’s work refuses some of the bedrock assumptions and dichotomies of humanistic scholarship. James Currie prioritizes music’s ability to “say no” to us as its most potentially radical quality. In their book The Undercommons (2013), Fred Moten and Stefano Harney call for academics to refuse the university while paradoxically staying inside of it, thus becoming “subversive intellectuals.” In the introduction to the book, Jack Halberstam notes that the path toward decolonization is “paved with refusal.” The first step, for Halberstam, is that we must learn how to desire a different version of freedom than the one the power structure tells us we want. Finally, I turn to the art theorist Jenny Odell’s (2019) notion of “refusal- in-place,” which will bring me back to the reconfigured version of collective autonomy I’m trying to construct, as well as to the anticapitalist value of uselessness. Odell’s book is a wide-ranging exploration of many of the different forms refusal can take, specifically refusals of demands on our attention that emanate from the corporate power structure. Music figures into many of her discussions, for example in her examination of how Spotify’s algorithm works to limit the realm of what we are able to think possible. She acknowledges that Spotify has correctly honed in on the type of music she most enjoys. However, she also notes that because her car doesn’t have an auxiliary input, she often listens to the radio when she drives, and often hears very different kinds of music that she also enjoys. Odell figures these moments—musical moments that exist outside her personalized algorithm—as offering some revelatory potential: “to acknowledge that there’s something I didn’t know I liked is to be surprised not only by the song but by myself.” Echoing James Currie’s assertion that “if we cannot see something other than ourselves, then we die,” Odell goes on to say: If I think I know everything that I want and like, and I also think I know where and how I’ll find it—imagining all of this stretching endlessly into the future without any 42 threats to my identity or the bounds of what I call my self—I would argue that I no longer have a reason to keep living. (137) The algorithms that increasingly guide our experiences make the encountering of real difference difficult, and they also make it harder and harder for us to see that we ourselves could become different, that we contain unplumbed depths that don’t fall into neat marketing demographic categories. But Odell rejects the idea of refusing the evils of corporatized society by fleeing from that society. She insists on refusing “in place” not only because abandoning the collective is politically indefensible, but also because increasingly there is nowhere left to run. The diseased political imaginary that not only makes domination and inequality possible but also assures us constantly that they are natural and good is everywhere: we are it. For this reason, she is most interested in “a form of political refusal that retreats not in space, but in the mind” (38). In exploring this idea, she suggests that the impulse to stand apart from what we experience as oppressive, in society, could actually “represent the moment in which the desperate desire to leave (forever!) matures into a commitment to live in permanent refusal, where one already is, and to meet others in the common space of that refusal” (62). Odell gives many powerful examples of refusal in place, many of which explore the way contemporary capitalism’s “ruthless logic of use” threatens to strip away all the mysteries and depths that make us who we are and that fill life with real meaning, in the form of connections with others and with ourselves. My favorite of her examples is Old Survivor, a 500-year-old redwood tree who lives in the Oakland hills. Old Survivor is Oakland’s only remaining old-growth redwood, a holdover from a long-gone era during which all of the ancient trees were logged following the Gold Rush. Old Survivor survived thanks to its difficult location on a steep slope; its twisted, awkward shape; and its shortness relative to the rest of the bygone redwoods in the area. “In other words,” Odell writes, “Old Survivor survived largely by appearing useless to loggers as a timber tree” (xv). This uselessness has enabled it to live, but not in the kind of hermetic isolation Adorno describes, and not in the hollow utilitarian cube of Gautier’s satire, and not even in the heroic self-sufficiency of the classical liberals’ Crusoe fantasies; rather, Old Survivor’s individual survival has powerfully social ramifications: birds build their nests in it, myriad insect colonies inhabit it; its massive root system performs maintenance care by inhibiting erosion and runoff; hikers rest in the shade it provides; a local biology class learns about bacteria by studying its bark. Thus, Old Survivor serves as a living metaphor of refusing-in-place, and of the way that such resistance is explicitly figured as 43 collective, a common property to which we all have access. Both the tree and the life forms that interact with it are participating together, but in what Odell calls “the wrong way” when looked at through the lens of capitalist productivity. This resonates with Adorno’s observations about how inscrutability resists commodification. Again, as with statements about “art” and “society,” it is important to be specific: to whom should things be inscrutable? Adorno would say, to everybody, because there are no longer individuals in the true sense of the word; there is no one left to communicate with. By contrast, Old Survivor’s inscrutability is profuse and wildly social. The birds, insects, hikers, biology students, and bacteria that engage with it do not find the tree—or one another— “inscrutable” at all. Only timber companies do. Whenever we do things together that lie outside the dominating logic of capital, whenever we find one another scrutable despite behaving in “the wrong way” in this regard, whenever we work, think, see, or act across supposedly unbreachable lines of difference in order to recognize that we are experiencing something together, we create the conditions of possibility for a different kind of world than the dying one bequeathed by Western capitalism.8 Bringing these thoughts closer to home, Moten and Harney (2020) explored a similar idea in a recent talk about untangling the concept of “work” from the concept of “job.” Discussing academic jobs in particular, they noted that “sadly, our feel for work, for practice, is slightened, obsessed as we all are and must be with the mechanics, economics, and metaphysics of the job.” If the university today is, in their words, “a dirty business and a state apparatus,” “a credential-granting front for finance capitalism and a machine for stratification,” then what does—or could—it mean to nonetheless find good work to do within the job of working here? After all, there are no “good” jobs out there, and anyway you can’t “not do your job” if you quit your job, so what could it mean, within the university, to do the work without doing the job, in other words to refuse in place, to participate in the wrong way? Moten and Harney are generally allergic to giving concrete examples—as with anarchism, the point is not to establish rules that everybody can equally follow but rather for each person to exploratorily answer this question for themselves, based on their own context and capability. Not doing your job when you have tenure is different from not doing your job when you are pre-tenure, or an adjunct, or a grad student. We all have different jobs to not-do. Separating our work from our jobs means asking unfamiliar questions. Meaning, unfamiliar types of questions, ones that don’t take the usual starting points as givens. Rachel Mundy (2018, 9) gives a good example when she asks 44 “what is an anti-speciesist history of music?” For most of us, the idea that music is a “human” practice is so obvious as to have become invisible. That simply is what music is: it’s something humans do. But what if other animals do it too? What if birdsong is music, rather than a type of sonic utterance totally different from music, as many (although not all!) nineteenth-century naturalists took great pains to insist? What would it mean, for us, if other animals experienced, and participated in constructing and evaluating, an aesthetic realm? It would mean that some fundamental unexamined truths about the ontological category of “the human” might be false, or incomplete. It might cause us to question who gets to be considered a “person,” and why, and why we feel so strongly about that distinction. After all, as Jenny Odell (2019) notes, it’s easy to miss the fact that when you look at a bird, the bird is also looking back at you. What new knowledge might arise, in probing into that encounter, the encounter between human constructed sound and the constructed sounds of birds, and the mutual—rather than one-sided—act of listening, thinking, and knowing that this encounter entails? What might seem new about our politics, our activities, our work, our understanding of what togetherness is, of what people are, of what music is or could be and how it could be known about, if we let such questions guide us, rather than submitting to the pleasurable lassitude of continuing to nod together at the same old truisms about music and humanity? Hope Without Optimism The easiest possible form refusal can take is available to everyone, and it is simply the commitment to try to tell the truth, even if only inside our own minds. We tell so many lies, to ourselves and to others, about the nature of reality, the essential rightness of power and hierarchy, the basic goodness of the way things are. To untangle all this requires a willingness to let ourselves see real truths that can be extremely painful. Fumi Okiji (2018, 50) for example argues that learning the truth requires “a state of keen interrogation,” in which we turn everything inside-out “in search of ulteriorities,” even to such an extent that “we no longer feel comfortable in our own homes.” Dismantling all the truisms and bad faith arguments that justify so many things about being academics living in the relative comfort of the imperial core will make us uncomfortable. Yet this act of discomfiting ourselves is also the first step toward the healing and recovery that bell hooks (1994) describes, when she says that the purpose of critical theory is to “expose wounds” so that healing can finally take place. The social scientist Lesley Head (2016) pursues this line of 45 thought in a devastating book about climate change. She argues that actually addressing climate change in any meaningful way will first require us to confront and authentically experience grief about it, and to accept the fact that this grief “will be our companion” for the rest of our lives. We—and here she takes care to clarify that by “we” she means the post-Enlightenment subjects of Western bourgeois humanism who still cling to the idea of history as a progress narrative (this is also the “we” I address, and it is always important to remember that this “we” doesn’t actually include all people on earth)—we are reluctant to really engage with grief in this way, Head argues, because grief seems like pessimism, and in contemporary liberal democracy—particularly in the U.S., as Barbara Ehrenreich (2009) has argued—we all know that we have to “think positive” no matter what. In this sense, Head suggests that our avoidance of grief manifests as denial, and that this basic denialism is a major feature of climate change discourse even amongst progressives who believe they care urgently about the climate. But the ideas for addressing climate change that are deemed “reasonable” according to liberal norms are just variations on business as usual— “green” capitalism instead of the other kind; carbon taxes; incentivizing public transit; etc.—and Head says we fixate on these limp non-solutions because they would be fairly easy to implement without our lifestyles having to change and without the global balance of power having to shift, and this allows us to feel optimistic. In this sense, Head bluntly states that “we are all climate change deniers” (26). Head quotes the ecologist Jessica Weir, who emphasizes this point: “There is something we must do before we can begin to do anything about river destruction. We have to look directly at ‘ecocide’ and acknowledge that it has happened” (quoted in Head, 32). In order to begin this process of grieving—of truth-telling—Head asks us to work to detach “hope” from “optimism.” Optimism is a feeling, and we actually don’t require it in order to commit ourselves to actions. By contrast, Head figures hope as a “practice,” meaning things we can do while grieving, whether or not we believe they will have a positive outcome. We do them regardless, simply because they are the right things to do, the only things worth doing. We do them because they represent a move toward truth rather than away from it, and truth is always better than lies. Among the lies we believe about politics, voting, institutions, police, ourselves, and each other, are the lies about music and art with which I began this article. We also tell ourselves optimistic lies about our field and the work we do as musicologists. For example, those of us who specialize in Western classical music may pretend we can address the white supremacist patriarchal 46 foundations of this music and the way it has been explained and celebrated for hundreds of years and the ways it has served to glorify and justify elite power and prestige by simply inserting some women and people of color into our syllabi and by engaging students in discussions of race and gender, perhaps even of class. These maneuvers are well intentioned, and I engage in them too, or I try to; given our various situations and contexts, they may be the best we can do. But as Loren Kajikawa (2019, 164) has recently argued, classical music itself constitutes an “ideology” manifesting a “possessive investment” in whiteness and white supremacy (I would also add patriarchy and elite-dominated class hierarchy), and that to “own” classical music—to master it, to teach it, to study it—“is to display a form of cultural capital that reinforces white belonging and privilege,” regardless of which composers are actually being taught, studied, or played. Barbara Tomlinson (2019, 175) similarly critiques the liberal commitment to “colorblindness,” pointing out that “if one is blind to color, one is also blind to power.” Meaning, if we continue to foreground (for example) sonata form, the development of tonality, and the four-movement symphony in our music history survey courses, but we try to do so in a “colorblind” and “genderblind” way—by teaching symphonies by women and people of color instead of only by white men—we leave the hegemonic sounds, styles, structures, theories, histories, and values of Western culture largely intact.9 Such inclusionary gestures do nothing to challenge or even to clearly identify Western culture itself, they merely emphasize (even celebrate) the fact that marginalized “others” have also sometimes participated in producing that culture. This has the (unintended?) effect of reiterating the supposed universality of Western culture and reasserting the values of bourgeois liberal humanism as the only epistemological frame for understanding “music.”10 Becoming Useless Together Although he argued that all music—all art—is to varying extents commodified and shaped by the market, Adorno (1932) nonetheless drew a firm line between “art music” and “popular music,” because of their different relations to market ideology. European art music is music that began as social function (in the church or at aristocratic parties, for example) but then moved away from serving such functions, ultimately becoming “art for art’s sake.” Part of what he finds meaningful about this music is the way it reveals something problematic about the autonomous ideal that it came to emblemize. Contemporary scholars have also problematized autonomy along similar lines. Anna Bull (2019) notes that 47 this ideal can serve as “camouflage” hiding the barriers that class and privilege put around classical music, for example. Furthermore, following Adorno, Okiji (2018, 34) argues that within capitalist rationality, “art has a crucial role to play as a sanctioned, cordoned-off site where people are able to fulfill those impulses that have been all but expelled from other areas of life.” In this formulation, autonomous art music is like the “free speech zones” police implemented during the post-9/11 protests against the Bush Administration: literally fenced off areas, far from the action, where people were required to politely stand if they wanted to protest. Free speech zones serve to make the U.S. state seem tolerant and permissive, while doing nothing to challenge the evils it perpetrates. The reappraised ideal of autonomy I am trying to construct is an anarchist one that actively refuses to enter this cordoned-off space, by refusing to continue agreeing with what the elite power structure says it is and is for. There is power in this kind of refusal, or there could be. The anarchist anthropologist David Graeber (McPhee and Reuland 2007) argues that despite its many obvious bourgeois trappings, the old notion of art for art’s sake simply represents the yearning for unalienated labor, labor undertaken at our own behest and for our own reasons. This is the aspect of musical autonomy I continue to feel committed to, and it is an aspect that is potentially available in any music—perhaps even including canonical music from the past that was initially created to serve power; it all depends on what we do with it. We have to be specific. What makes music interesting to me is precisely how foolish and impractical so much of it is via the metrics of the rationalist capitalist project, and yet how hard people work and how much they sacrifice to create it anyway. In fact, Marx pursues this idea in his vision of what work will look like after the destruction of the wage relation and the division of labor. In the Grundrisse (1993), he notes that liberal political economists conceive work as a “curse,” and believe that humans are only free when they are not working at all. Marx dismisses this perspective as being already steeped in the bourgeois expectation that all labor is “forced”: when Adam Smith argues that work is a curse, he “has only the slaves of capital in mind.” At the same time, Marx also takes issue with the utopian socialists who believed that in a free society work will become “mere fun, mere amusement.” Dismissing this notion as an expression of “naïveté,” Marx insists that the main thing characterizing work in a truly free society will be that it is work freely chosen, rather than imposed by law or necessity. In this formulation, work can and should be an expression of individual self-realization, even when—perhaps especially when—it is difficult. Although in his entire oeuvre Marx barely mentions music, in this section of the Grundrisse he uses 48 musical composition as the paradigmatic example of “really free working” that is “at the same time precisely the most damned seriousness, the most intense exertion” (611). Music in general, in so many of its formulations, represents a collective act people work hard to do together regardless of its potential for material gain. Music’s (sometime) resonance with the yearning for unalienated labor also resonates with Moten and Harney’s observations about finding “the work” within “the job,” and trying to do the one without doing the other. This is necessarily a social, a collective, act of refusal. Breaking out of the deeply-worn grooves in our disciplinary approach to (and public advocacy of) music would lead to radical changes in which music we value, which music we teach, and which aspects of music’s forms, aesthetics, practices, and histories we center in our thinking and teaching. This might be one reason to rethink the kind of abstract art that so many leftists scorn; the anarchist John Zerzan (1994; 2002), for example, puts a different spin on the representational art that many of his political peers insist is the only kind of art that can serve class struggle. For Zerzan, by contrast, it is representational art that is authoritarian, because it tells us what it is and what it means—in short, it tells us what and how to think. Indeed, Clifford Harper’s insistence that art serve as propaganda upholds this reading. In its content, such art may resist power—for example a strophic song might urge citizens to revolt— but in its form, Zerzan argues, such art reiterates the symbolic order and conventional ways of knowing and naming, and thus prevents our imaginations from developing fully. Abstract art, according to Zerzan, rejects even this hierarchy—the hierarchy of symbolic meaning. It poses unfamiliar questions, renders the familiar strange, and perhaps in doing so, surprises us into suddenly understanding that our epistemological framework for seeing and knowing is actually just one among many potential frameworks. This notion might make more interesting the kind of abstract art music that today seems to pose the biggest problem for music advocates because of its inaccessibility and lack of wide consumer appeal. In embracing the particular version of uselessness I’ve tried to elucidate here, I suggest we try to once again embrace the potential autonomy of music, but in a way that recontextualizes it within the contemporary political landscape. For it to be meaningful, our embrace of autonomy must be explicitly anticapitalist, as Adorno’s was, and yet unlike Adorno’s it must not be circumscribed by the framework of European bourgeois humanism; it must be an ideal that is able to encompass a vast array of difference in terms of how to 49 make, hear, and know about music. Also, unlike Adorno’s formulation, a truly radical embrace of autonomy must provide a space not merely of negating but also of offering. All the diverse perspectives I have brought together in this essay have helped me chart my own course through these complexities, and I offer them here in the spirit of building something new together. I believe we can do this by reaching into and celebrating our vast collective potential for useless creative activity. Music by its ephemeral nature is not fully commodifiable, not fully available to capitalism’s totalizing project. Thus, in addition to grief, there is also joy here, in our potential for insurrection and reimagining. For starters, clearly identifying, celebrating, and actively pursuing useless collective activities (like musicking and like musicology) explicitly because of their uselessness might reaffirm something capitalism has never been able to account for, which is our desire to not just exist but to love existing, and our belief that everyone else deserves to love existing too, regardless of their relative usefulness to this or that progressive project. Acts of collective uselessness can be grand gestures that actively threaten capital, for example a general strike; they can also be comparatively small and brief, perhaps no more than a thought experiment, an internal Temporary Autonomous Zone (Bey 1991) where we play with refusals of various kinds. We can start our hopeful practice by consciously rooting ourselves in music not despite the difficulty of making it seem useful to capitalism, but because of that difficulty, and because of the radical new imaginative possibilities embracing that difficulty could open up for us. Notes 1 Théophile Gautier, Mademoiselle de Maupin, 15. There is no recent or particularly definitive English translation of Maupin. The book, including two of its early English translations, is in the public domain and can be read in full on Google Books. Page numbers given here refer to a Digireads reprint of the 1899 translation (by J.S. Chartres) published by Gibbings and Company, in London. 2 For a wonderful study of French bohemian culture, including insights into how these artists responded to their own caricaturing in the mainstream press, see Mary Gluck, Popular Bohemia: Modernism and Urban Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005). 3 Mouffe does not use the term “political imaginary” in her exploration; I use it here to emphasize the way that a given political system can shape not only the material realities of its subjects but also their inner lives and ways of seeing and knowing. 4 See also Gallope 2017; and Thompson and Biddle 2013. 50 5 Adorno and other members of the Frankfurt School argued that fascism is not external to liberalism but rather will always be an aspect of it so long as it fails to deliver on its promises. See Adorno, Aspects of the New Right-Wing Extremism (1967) and The Authoritarian Personality (1950). 6 Freud, too, fails to differentiate significantly between types of civilizations, although his emphasis is on Judeo-Christianity. 7 See also Lewis (2016) on a “politics of everybody” that “doesn’t refuse antagonisms.” 8 For longer readings that seek to work across multiple lines of difference, in order to depict life on earth as a vast shared network of diverse life forms, see Kimmerer 2020; and Tsing 2015. 9 See also Ewell 2020. 10 See also Taylor 2007. References Adorno, Theodor W. (1932) 2002. “Late Style in Beethoven,” In Essays on Music, edited by Richard Leppert, translated by Susan H. Gillespie. 564-568. Berkeley: University of California Press. ____________. (1932) 2002. “On the Social Situation of Music.” In Essays on Music, edited by Richard Leppert, translated by Susan H. Gillespie. 391-436. Berkeley: University of California Press. ____________. (1970) 1997. Aesthetic Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ____________. (1967) 2020. Aspects of the New Right-Wing Extremism, translated by Wieland Hoban. New York: Polity Press. ____________. (1950) 2020. The Authoritarian Personality. London: Verso. Bey, Hakim. 1991. T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism. Brooklyn: Autonomedia. Bull, Anna. 2019. Class, Control, and Classical Music. New York: Oxford University Press. Currie, James. 2009. “Music After All.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 62/1: 145-203. ____________. 2008. “Garden Disputes: Postmodern Beauty and the Sublime Neighbor: A Response to Judy Lochhead’s ‘The Sublime, the Ineffable, and Other Dangerous Aesthetics.” Women and Music 12: 75-86. ____________. 2011. “Music and Politics. In The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Music, edited by Theodore Gracyk and Andrew Kanie. New York: Routledge. ____________. 2012. Music and the Politics of Negation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Davis, Angela. 2003. Are Prisons Obsolete? New York: Seven Stories Press. ____________. 1996. “Gender, Class, and Multiculturalism: Rethinking ‘Race’ Politics.” In Mapping Multiculturalism, edited by Avery F. Gordon and Christopher Newfield. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ehrenreich, Barbara. 2009. Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. New York: Metropolitan Books. Ewell, Philip A. 2020. “Music Theory and the White Racial Frame.” Music Theory Online 26/2. 51 Freud, Sigmund. (1930) 1989. Civilization and Its Discontents. New York: Norton. Gallope, Michael. 2017. Deep Refrains: Music, Philosophy, and the Ineffable. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. 2007. Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. Berkeley: University of California Press. Goldman, Emma. (1911) 2014. Anarchism: and Other Essays. London: Active Distribution. Head, Lesley. 2016. Hope and Grief in the Anthropocene: Re-Conceptualising Human- Nature Relations. New York: Routledge. Harney, Stefano, and Fred Moten. 2013. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study. Wivenhoe: Minor Compositions. ____________. 2020. “The University: Last Words.” Talk given at the University of California, Irvine’s graduate student symposium, FUC. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqWMejD_XU8. hooks, bell. 1984. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. Boston: South End Press. ____________. 1994.“Theory as Liberatory Practice.” Reprinted in Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge. INCITE!, eds. 2007. The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex. Cambridge: South End Press. Kajikawa, Loren. 2019. “The Possessive Investment in Classical Music: Confronting Legacies of White Supremacy in U.S. Schools,” in Seeing Race Again: Countering Colorblindness Across the Disciplines, edited by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Luke Charles Harris, Daniel Martinez HoSang, and George Lipsitz. 155-74. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kimmerer, Robin Wall. 2020. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions. Lalami, Laila. 2019. “‘Bothsidesism’ Is Poisoning American.” The Nation. Lewis, Holly. 2016. The Politics of Everybody: Feminism, Queer Theory, and Marxism at the Intersection. London: Zed Books. Malatesta, Errico. (1891) 1974. Anarchy. Trans. Vernon Richards. London: Freedom Press. Marx, Karl. (1867) 1990. Capital Vol. I, translated by Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin. ____________. (1939) 1993. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft). Translated by Martin Nicolaus. London: Penguin Books. McPhee, Josh, and Erik Reuland, eds. 2007. Realizing the Impossible: Art Against Authority. Oakland: AK Press. Miles, Stephen. 1995. “Critics of Disenchantment.” Notes 52/1: 11-38. Millstein, Cindy. 2010. Anarchism and Its Aspirations. Oakland: AK Press. Mouffe, Chantal. 2005. The Democratic Paradox. London: Verso. Mundy, Rachel. 2018. Animal Musicalities: Birds, Beasts, and Evolutionary Listening. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. National Assembly of State Arts Agencies. 2017. “State Policy Brief: Tools for Arts Decision Making” https://nasaa-arts.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/WhyGovSupport.pdf. Odell, Jenny. 2019. How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. Brooklyn: Melville House. 52 Okiji, Fumi. 2018. Jazz as Critique: Adorno and Black Expression Revisited. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Ritchey, Marianna. 2019. Composing Capital: Classical Music in the Neoliberal Era. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Taylor, Timothy D. 2007. Beyond Exoticism: Western Music and the World. Durham: Duke University Press. Thompson, Marie, and Ian Biddle, eds. 2013. Sound, Music, Affect: Theorizing Sonic Experience. New York: Bloomsbury. Tomlinson, Barbara. 2019. “Powerblind Intersectionality: Feminism and Inclusion as a One- Way Street.” In Seeing Race Again: Countering Colorblindness Across the Disciplines, edited by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Luke Charles Harris, Daniel Martinez HoSang, and George Lipsitz. 175-99. Berkeley: University of California Press. Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015). Veblen, Thorsten. (1899) 1953. The Theory of the Leisure Class. New York: New American Library. Vitale, Alex. 2018. The End of Policing. London: Verso. Weir, David. 1997. Anarchy and Culture: The Aesthetic Politics of Modernism. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Williams, Kristian. 2015. Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America. Oakland: AK Press. Zerzan, John. 1994. Future Primitive, and Other Essays. New York: Autonomedia. ____________. 2002. Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilisation. Port Townshend, WA: Feral House.