XVI Colloquium: July 12 - 19, 2005:
The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC
"Discourses and Practices of Hegemony, Power, and Exclusion in Music Education"

Beyond Hide and Seek: The Need to Theorize Musical Embodiment
Wayne Bowman
Brandon, MB, Canada

Because I devoted quite a bit of my allocated time to commenting on issues that had arisen in our deliberations, my treatment of embodiment (my designated topic) was quite abbreviated. In what follows, I will focus most extensively on the comments I made pursuant to the concept of hegemony. I will then sketch very briefly the direction I had intended to take in discussing embodiment.

Hegemony, power, exclusion

My first concern was the tendency of our discussions to focus on issues of power and exclusion, with relatively little consideration of the idea of hegemony. One of the reasons advanced was that "hegemony" is an awkward term, not part of everyday vocabulary. However, the term designates something distinctive, pervasive, and highly relevant to critical theory: to pass over it would be a serious mistake. Perhaps hegemony, power, and exclusion aren't always linked as tightly as the conference title implies - power and exclusion can and do sometimes operate in non-hegemonic ways. What concerns me primarily, however, is what might be called conceptual or ideological hegemony: the tenacity of beliefs and ideas that just don't square with the evidence, and the means by which their dominance is maintained, to the exclusion of more promising alternatives. We cannot effectively counter such patterns of exclusion without addressing their source. What does hegemony mean, and how does it relate to issues of power and exclusion? Clearly, exclusion is a function of power. But not all exclusionary practices are deliberate and coercive: many are indirect, subtle, perhaps unintended. I think the term hegemony is rightly associated with these latter (more on that shortly), and that understanding it is therefore crucial to orientations that purport to be critically informed.

My second concern was that the "social interactionist" framework advanced by Professor Froehlich seemed reluctant to go beyond description or analysis: it made no provision for (indeed, it seemed determined to evade the possibility of) committed action - strategic resistance to hegemonic influences. My sense from Froehlich's account was that we should simply accept hegemony as an unavoidable feature of human interactions - a pervasive feature of human interaction that "just is." That being the case, we may attempt to resist or subvert hegemonic influences; however, to do so is simply to engage in another, different hegemonic practice: Counterhegemony is still hegemony. Thus conceived, interactionism seems to seek a non-normative stance, one that begins and ends with description and understanding. 1

On the other hand, my concern with hegemony, power, and exclusion - the reason they interest me - is critical in orientation. I want to understand them in order to change them or resist them where warranted. It's fine to examine how and where exclusion works in music education, but when exclusionary effects are demonstrably undesirable, we are obligated to do more than understand them. We are obligated to resist them, to attempt to change them. Does interactionism preclude action? Isn't failure to resist undesirable circumstances a kind of action itself? In my view, hegemonic influences work systemically, and to the extent we are part of the systems that perpetuate them, we are complicit. The fact that there is no escaping hegemonic practices does not relieve us of the ethical obligations to choose and engage, support or resist, discriminatingly and deliberately.

What is meant by hegemony? Hegemony as I understand it is about the way(s) power (which of course shapes/influences the patterns of inclusion and exclusion with which this conference was in part concerned) gets entrenched and maintained without force. Unlike domination, its mechanism isn't directly coercive; instead, it consists in the ability of a party or group to persuade others to see the world in ways that favor its own dominance or ascendancy. Hegemony concerns the ways dominant parties control discourses, practices and beliefs without the consent or even awareness of the dominated (that is, those whose interests are disadvantaged by such discourses, practices and beliefs). Hegemonic dominance is sociocultural. Hegemony (especially as described in the writings of Antonio Gramsci) is a mode of influence with the capacity to make the oppressed collude in their own oppression, or, in any event, to accept it as "the way things are." Its stock-in-trade is the "common sense," the inevitable, what "goes without saying." The hegemonic "trick", then, is to make the arbitrary and the contingent (even the unjust, or the demonstrably false) appear inevitable, natural, absolute, inescapable. At least one of the ideological mechanisms by which it works - or so it seems to me - involves the deployment of conceptual dichotomies and hierarchies. Hegemonic ideologies maintain their power by reducing shades of grey to blacks or whites; by dividing the world into the authentic and the fake, the legitimate and the illegitimate, the pure and the defiled, the right and the wrong, and then somehow convincing people that these exhaust the possibilities. You're either with us or against us. Some choice. Since even a decision to resist usually accepts the grounds for that choice, perpetuation of the system is assured. As Audre Lorde so vividly puts it, the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.

Equally potent hegemonic resources are ceremony, ritual, and the various other trappings in which tradition cloaks itself in order to create what Jas Elsner aptly calls the "spectacle of insuperable resources." Hegemonic persuasion is, Elsner maintains, a matter of "impression, of theatre, of persuading those over whom authority is wielded to collude in their subjugation." Thus art, image, and ritual are crucial - at least as strategically influential, it would seem, as logic or rational argument. Even a compellingly true argument, thus, may be powerless to effect real change.

Also important, it seems to me, are the creation of strategic alliances with other influential/powerful institutions, alliances that help secure perceived legitimacy by associative means. Thus, power and influence beget further power and influence. Each of these mechanisms enhances the capacity of those with power to manage or control the terms of debate when their ideologies or principles are challenged: to isolate, discredit, or undercut resisters, using what Shoemaker & Reese call "repair tactics." The interesting and important question for me is: How do hegemonic ideologies succeed in making people engage in practices that, right though they may feel, are not really in their own best interests? in practices that, however noble-sounding, actually cause people harm? in practices that are unacceptably divisive and exclusionary? And what can be done to subvert such hegemonic ideologies? To bring these abstract matters closer to home: How is it that music educators remain so "taken" by "aesthetic" (of the Kantian/modernist ilk) accounts of music and its value, when these beget educational and musical practices that are unjust and deeply exclusionary? Aesthetic doctrines beget the exclusion of entire musical practices, of the people who make and value such musics, of instruments and modes of musical engagement, of the social and the political from the realm of the properly-musical, of bodies as sources of musical meaning, of vast ranges of pedagogical possibilities, and on and on. The MayDay Group has become relatively well known for its rejections of the "aesthetic rationale" for music education. However, that "rationale" aside, the crucial fact remains that most musical instruction and experience in universities rests upon unexamined and systemically pervasive aesthetic premises: premises that powerfully enforce what/who is musically legitimate, acceptable, included - and not. Our "disciplines" are major hegemonic forces, tightly linked to identity and patterns of inclusion/exclusion - and highly resistant to rational interventions. 2

Again, my concern with hegemony: How do such pervasive ideological influences sustain themselves, and what can be done to effectively resist or to change them? The point is not to understand phenomena like these. The point is to use such understanding to change them. 3

Embodiment

The body is the Achilles heel of hegemony
-- John Fiske

My presentation on embodiment was intended to explore the hegemony of logocentric or abstract accounts of music: the pervasive wariness of music's bodily roots (or somatophobia) that manifests itself in widespread suspicion toward acts of music making. [The "Hide and Seek" reference is to our aversive tendency to hide music's bodily roots, then seek displaced musical significance in more properly mindful realms.] From this perspective, listening is the more contemplative, reasoned, and trustworthy way of relating to music. Music making is bodily, listening is mindful. These notions have an extraordinarily long history in music philosophy. They have also figured centrally and recently in philosophical accounts of music education. The crux of the problem, and the factor that needs to be addressed if we are to break out of the vicious circle created when performing and listening are seen as opposite ways of relating to music, lies not just in asserting the rationality of music making, but in recognizing the bodily basis of musical listening. An embodied account of music refuses to oppose body and mind: it does not simply invert the mind/body hierarchy, arguing the superiority of playing to listening. When we use the master's tools in this way, we redesign the master's house rather than rebuilding it.

I would argue that much of the blame for this perennial confusion - for the hegemony of 'mentalistic' conceptions of music, and our perennial defensiveness about musical action - follows from failures to see that both listening and making are embodied. Again, the most egregious discourses of exclusion in music (exclusions of the body, of societies, of politics, of pedagogies, and indeed, of whole musical practices) can probably be traced directly to modernist aesthetic theory. We need to understand better the mechanisms by which aesthetic accounts of music maintain their hegemony: if, that is, we are to develop more inclusive musical and educational practices.

***
Notes to Bowman Abstract

1 Might this desired view be the view from nowhere, the stance that is not itself a stance? That's what philosophers have often described as the gods-eye view.

2 I have the same concern about a great deal of what goes by the name of philosophical practice in music education. Attempts to make the practice of philosophy more rigorous encounter enormous resistance from the hegemonic influences designed to control whose voices are considered legitimate or illegitimate. Within music education philosophy, this results in an "anything-goes-as-long-as-it's-congruent-with-prevailing-sentiments" mentality, which compromises any claim to professional advancement we might wish to make. And within the music education profession more broadly, it assures that philosophy is regarded as "only philosophy" - equated more or less to the expression of personal opinion, and emphatically inferior to the rigors of empirical research.

3 I'm well aware the Marxist origin of this slogan; but one need not be a Marxist to endorse its challenge.