Running with the Devil. Robert Walser
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more absolute or less complex than social contestation, institutional prestige, and power. But there can be no meaningful semiology apart from ethnographic inquiry, historical analysis, and argumentation about culture. There is no way to decide what something means without making a political statement. Underpinning all semiotic analysis is, recognized or not, a set of assumptions about cultural practice, for ultimately music doesn’t have meanings; people do. There is no essential, foundational way to ground musical meaning beyond the flux of social existence. Ultimately, musical analysis can be considered credible only if it helps explain the significance of musical activities in particular social contexts.
Some semioticians and philosophers of language, such as David Lidov and Mark Johnson, have worked to ground discursive meanings somatically, in terms of (socially constructed) bodily gestures, tensions, and postures.14 In The Body in the Mind, philosopher Mark Johnson argues that meanings of all sorts, even the ones that seem most abstract and mental, are grounded in bodily experience. While Johnson’s own analyses of artworks are rather simplistic, his epistemological challenge to the Western mind/body split is important. Human experiences of meaningfulness, Johnson argues, are grounded at the level of prelinguistic structures which organize our experience and comprehension, which he calls “image schemata.” These schemata are not concepts; they are patterns of activity, fundamental mechanisms of meaning production that inform the more abstract operations of language and conceptual thinking. Johnson argues that metaphor links these bodily image schemata to language. Metaphor, in this view, occupies a central place in the production of human meaning. It is not merely a kind of poetic expression or a literary figure of speech; rather, metaphor is a crucial process for generating meaning, whereby we come to understand one area of experience in terms of another.15 It is by means of metaphor that image-schematic structures are extended, transformed, and elaborated into domains of meaning that may seem less directly tied to the body, including language, abstract reasoning, and, I would argue, music.
Attempts to explain “music as metaphor” have appeared with some regularity, but metaphorical interpretations appear to many scholars to be arbitrary: the images you describe in response to a piece of music may be wholly unlike those I would use, and a positivistic orientation would then declare meaning, in this sense, subjective and out of bounds. In rebuttal to what he calls the Objectivist rejection of metaphor, Johnson stresses that meanings at the level of image schemata and metaphor are grounded in physical and social experience that is shared. He argues that image schemata “can have a public, objective character …, because they are recurring structures of embodied human understanding.”16 Johnson presents his theory of image schemata and metaphoric links as a solution to what he sees as the false dichotomy between objectivist absolutism and “anything goes” relativism. That is, meanings are neither objectively inherent nor subjectively arbitrary; they arise out of human experiences of social interaction with a material world.
As Johnson acknowledges, experiences of the body differ with place, time, and culture; musical meaning can be situated in bodily experience not in any essentialist way, then, but as a reciprocal element in a “web of culture” in which real human bodies are ensnared and supported. Yet even such theorizing cannot ground meaning “below” the level of discourse, for the body and the physical world cannot be experienced or thought outside of discourse. If musical gestures are experienced as physical or emotional gestures, these experiences are dependent on the discursive operation of the concepts and metaphors that make all of these terms meaningful.
In an important intervention in the field of the cognitive psychology of music, John A. Sloboda argues that while some responses to music seem to be consistent across cultures—fast and loud is perceived as arousing, slow and soft as soothing—listeners within a culture can generally agree upon finer readings of the “emotional character” even of pieces they have never heard before. Thus, musical meanings are neither a matter of “conditioning” through nonmusical associations nor of aggregative perception of atomized sound events—both influential formulations in the field. Rather, Sloboda’s arguments point toward the utility of discourse as a way of conceiving of the musical production of meaning.17
Even while they try to map the terms of a discourse, analysts must keep in mind that a variety of interpretations of musical texts is always possible, for popularity among various audiences arises both from the polysemy of texts and conventions—their potential to mean different things to different people—and from what Bakhtin calls their heteroglossia: their reproduction of multiple discourses and social voices. That is, signs are always susceptible to various interpretations because meanings can never be absolutely fixed. But because the social world is not monolithic, discourses inevitably structure in plural and contradictory meanings; many meanings are contained within any text. And the more popular a text is, the more likely it is to be found relevant in different ways. As Dee Snider of Twisted Sister says of the song “We’re Not Gonna Take It,” “It’s very general—we weren’t specific about just what it is we aren’t taking—work, school, whatever—so you can apply it to anything you want.”18 And in fact the song has found unexpected utility as the theme song of several workers’ strikes.19
However, the fact that ideas can be fairly consistently communicated, regardless of the nuances of individual response, is what points to the importance of musical discourses as coherent systems of signification. The range of possible interpretations may be theoretically infinite, but in fact certain preferred meanings tend to be supported by those involved with a genre, and related variant meanings are commonly negotiated. As Fiske says, the text “establishes the boundaries of the arena within which the struggle for meaning can occur.”20 So while meanings are negotiated, discourse constructs the terms of the negotiation. Genres such as heavy meta! are sites where seemingly stable discourses temporarily organize the exchange of meanings. In practice, subcultural and other social alignments play a large role in channeling the reception of popular music. For music is not just a symbolic register for what really happens elsewhere; it is itself a material, social practice, wherein subject positions are constructed and negotiated, social relations are enacted and transgressed, and ideologies are developed and interrogated.21
Musical discourses constantly cross national boundaries and revise cultural boundaries, but they signify variously in different contexts. For example, a friend gave me a tape of Pokolgép, a Hungarian heavy metal band, and I discovered that their music is very different from that of the bands that are popular in the United States. It sounds oppressive, lacking what I’ve called the heavy metal dialectic; the guitar solos, which are fewer than is normal in U.S. and British metal, offer no escape, no transcendence. The guitars don’t contribute transgressive fills (harmonics, bent notes, etc.), and the mood is very controlled and mechanical. No harmonic momentum is ever built up; progressions are heavily grounded by dominant chords, which are rare in Western metal. The lyrics, which my friend translated for me, are poignant and desperate, speaking eloquently of a state of alienation where there is no future, no past, no freedom, no security, and also no hope, no fantastic transcendence, no dreams of anything better. The lyrics recount youthful and historical pain but, along with the music, suggest no youthful exuberance, no energetic defiance. I don’t know the context well enough to assert that the implications of this reading are correct; what seems clear is that the international conventions of heavy metal have been strongly inflected by the particular ideological needs of a local community.
Musical meaning, then, has more or less broad social bases and constituencies upon which interpretation is dependent, as well as its associated political economies, the commercial contexts that organize all stages of production and consumption. The latter field has been extensively analyzed by scholars of popular music;22 what has been relatively neglected is the problem of just how popular musical texts produce meaning and how such meanings operate not only within the contexts of political economies but also within social history and lived experience. Specific musical analysis is important because music is social practice. Music and society are not just related phenomena; music is a type of social activity and a register of such experience. John Blacking remarked that it has long been a commonplace of ethnomusicological analysis that, while music is socially grounded, it cannot articulate any new meanings, express anything not already in the mind of the listener.23 But music can enact relationships and