Closing thoughts (not forgetting
politics)
David Clarke
International Conference on Music and Consciousness
University of Sheffield, 19 July 2006
Dennett on the ‘web of
discourses’
Each normal individual of this species [Homo
sapiens] makes a self. Out of its brain it spins a web
of words and deeds, and like other creatures, it
doesn’t have to know what it’s doing; it just does it.
This ‘web of discourses’ … is as much a biological
product as any of the other constructions to be found
in the animal world. Stripped of it, an individual
human being is as incomplete as a bird without its
feathers, a turtle without its shell.
Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained, 416
Implications of Dennett’s
statement

(Interesting deconstruction of biology and culture)
 Our sense of a conscious self coterminous with
process of spinning webs of discourse
– of which music is one
 Of which Consciousness Studies is another
– i.e. not conducted from neutral space outside the
web.
 NB on Dennett’s view, discourse emerges out of
inner pandemonium(!) - cf. discursive chaos of musicand-consciousness community
On defining ‘consciousness’ in a
multidisciplinary context

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
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Can we ever agree on a definition?
Better to make a virtue of not trying to?
Definition necessary within disciplines, but
problematic (indeed ideological) to impose
agreement between them.
A radical alternative to ‘defining’
consciousness on a multidisciplinary level:
Treat ‘consciousness’ as a signifier.
Some thoughts after Žižek (in
The Sublime Object of
Ideology)
Žižek on the signifier ‘democracy’:
 Meaning varies according to ideological
framework, e.g.

– liberal
– socialist
– communist

So too, by analogy, for ‘consciousness’
What if we considered ‘consciousness’ not as
being saturated with meaning, but as …
 an empty signifier - not defined by positive
content.
 in ‘proto-ideological’ no man’s land:

– part of array of ‘non bound’ signifiers in freefloating discursive network

until (in a second moment) these are fixed in
an ideological field around a ‘nodal point’ or
point de capiton (Lacan)

‘What is at stake in the ideological
struggle is which of the “nodal points” …
will totalize, include in its series of
equivalences, these free-floating
elements.’
Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 88.
Each discipline will stitch
‘consciousness’ into its own different
discursive quilt
 Each a different ideological field
 Plural (probably incommensurable)
definitions
 Leads to multidisciplinary culture
defined by …

A(nta)gonism

Contesting of views around the signifier
‘consciousness’
 Potential human benefit (learning to negotiate
between epistemes)
 Dialogic:
– may be some convergence(s); or
– we may come out of encounters with our views
changed

We may find we no longer need the term (and
so we move on to the next historical moment)
More political issues:
Ideological assumption of ‘abstract’ (or
‘neutral’) consciousness
 Is ‘personal’ consciousness possible?

– (cf. ‘locked-in’ syndrome)

Or is consciousness always public /
shared?
– or at least mediated by cultural discourses
The ‘hard’ questions
Does consciousness studies need
music studies?
 Does music studies need
consciousness studies?
 (Can the questions be answered
separately?)

Some possible inputs from music

Possible corrective to fixation on static visual
metaphors in much of consciousness studies
– understanding of how we process music in time
(diachronically) could provide metaphors for
processes of conscious self in time.

Qualia
– something other than the colour red!
– musical versions of ‘what Mary knows’?

Pandemonium
– ‘The idea has been around for several years that
human consciousness might then be the activity of
some sort of serial virtual machine implemented
on the parallel hardware of the brain’.
(Dennett, Consciousness Explained, 258-9)
– Music (and other time-based utterances) provide
different constructions of this phenomenon
• ‘different’ in sense of both ‘other’ and ‘variable’
Further issues

Unconsciousness
– again contested definitions
???
 The future?
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