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THE BERGSONIAN LINK BETWEEN EMOTION, MUSIC AND PLACE: FROM THE “MOTION OF EMOTION” TO THE SONIC IMMEDIACY OF THE BASQUE BAND LISABÖ

2009; Routledge; Volume: 10; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/14636200902990737

1469-9818

Benjamín Fraser,

Geographies of human-animal interactions

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. See www.elsevier.com/wps/locate/emospa 2. See also Williams. 3. Fraser Fraser , Benjamin "On Mental and Cartographic Space: Belén Gopegui's La escala de los mapas, Bergson and the Imagined Interval." España Contemporánea 18.1 2005 : 7 32 . [Google Scholar], ''Toward a Philosophy of the Urban''. 4. These include the Basque-born philosopher/novelist Miguel de Unamuno (Fraser Fraser , Benjamin "On Mental and Cartographic Space: Belén Gopegui's La escala de los mapas, Bergson and the Imagined Interval." España Contemporánea 18.1 2005 : 7 32 . [Google Scholar] "Unamuno and Bergson"), the medical doctor-turned prolific writer Pío Baroja (Fraser Fraser , Benjamin "On Mental and Cartographic Space: Belén Gopegui's La escala de los mapas, Bergson and the Imagined Interval." España Contemporánea 18.1 2005 : 7 32 . [Google Scholar] "Baroja's Rejection of Traditional Medicine"), the compelling lawyer-turned novelist Belén Gopegui (Fraser Fraser , Benjamin "On Mental and Cartographic Space: Belén Gopegui's La escala de los mapas, Bergson and the Imagined Interval." España Contemporánea 18.1 2005 : 7 32 . [Google Scholar] "On Mental and Cartographic Space"), the Universitat de Barcelona's titular professor of Anthropology Manuel Delgado Ruiz (Fraser Fraser , Benjamin "On Mental and Cartographic Space: Belén Gopegui's La escala de los mapas, Bergson and the Imagined Interval." España Contemporánea 18.1 2005 : 7 32 . [Google Scholar] "Manuel Delgado's Urban Anthropology"), and the reknowned writer and critic Juan Goytisolo (Fraser Fraser , Benjamin "On Mental and Cartographic Space: Belén Gopegui's La escala de los mapas, Bergson and the Imagined Interval." España Contemporánea 18.1 2005 : 7 32 . [Google Scholar] "A Snapshot of Barcelona from Montjuïc"). 5. The Spanish word is "euskera" while the Basque word is "euskara". See alsowww.ehu.es/grammar for "A Brief Grammar of Euskara, the Basque Language" posted by Itziar Laka at the University of the Basque Country. 6. She takes on the "transhuman" or "posthuman" character of this work by Thrift and McCormack and, ultimately, I concur with her assertion that there is an aspect of pursuing a transhuman or posthuman agenda as such that is dangerous to our critical and quotidian practices and postures. At the very least the labels themselves implicitly embrace an essentialist contrast between the products of humanity and humanity itself, and a simplistic and reified understanding of the human organism and our evolutionary history, one that in fact contradicts with much of the message of such scholarship of the posthuman thus making one wonder if another term might have been employed to label what is nevertheless interesting research. I ultimately share with Thien her concern regarding moving past the state of being human. Thien writes: "My concern is not, then, with evoking a politics of intent, but rather with valorizing a politics which is intent on moving beyond or past the state of being human (a politics which leads inevitably to questions of which human states are to be abandoned – by contrast, see Conradson and Latham Conradson , David , and Alan Latham "Transnational Urbanism: Attending to Everyday Practices and Mobilities." Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 31 2005 : 227 33 .[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar] [2005] who advocate careful attention to the everyday practices and mobilities of translocal subjects)" (452). 7. See also the response by the pair of Ben Anderson and Paul Harrison. 8. On Thrift, for example: "This affective turn in social and critical thought is challenging the 'residual cultural Cartesianism' (Thrift 57) which keeps emotion out of place within academic research and practice" (Thien 450). On Thrift's effort to seek out a positive engagement with the world and McCormack's emphasis on the ethical: "The emphasis on seeking to positively engage with and to honour what is on the surface—or perhaps more accurately, to dissolve such spatial distinctions—signals a politics of intent and concern, more broadly, with an ethical research process … each of these aims, in and of themselves, is I would argue desirable" (Thien 452). As I read it, she merely wishes that their somewhat abstract and theoretical analyses would link up with a more concrete and lived reality. But from my perspective this poses the very question of what research should be about. It is difficult to sustain the belief that analyses that frame themselves in a more theoretical manner or alternately those that choose to explore the concrete are somehow less important than those that purport to do both. A dialectical view of reality needs to involve a diachronic view of scholarship. 9. In Fraser Fraser , Benjamin "On Mental and Cartographic Space: Belén Gopegui's La escala de los mapas, Bergson and the Imagined Interval." España Contemporánea 18.1 2005 : 7 32 . [Google Scholar] ("The Publicly-Private Space of Madrid's Retiro Park") I take on this topic in greater depth. 10. See Fraser Fraser , Benjamin "On Mental and Cartographic Space: Belén Gopegui's La escala de los mapas, Bergson and the Imagined Interval." España Contemporánea 18.1 2005 : 7 32 . [Google Scholar] ("The Difference Space Makes"). Bergson's work was, in fact, very publicly debated, and eventually the tide turned from admiration to denunciation, his works even being placed on the Index of Prohibited Books by the Catholic Church in 1914. See the sections titled "Bergson's Fall from Popularity" (Gillies Gillies, Mary Ann. 1996. Henri Bergson and British Modernism, Montreal and Kingston: MGill-Queen's University Press. [Google Scholar] 25–7) and "The Damnation of Bergson" (Douglass Douglass, Paul. 1986. Bergson, Eliot and American Literature, Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. [Google Scholar] 13–17). On Bergson's popularity see Bistis Bistis , Marguerite "Managing Bergson's Crowd: Professionalism and the Mondain at the Collège de France." Historical Reflections/Reflexions historiques 22.2 1996 : 389 406 . [Google Scholar]. 11. On the Einstein-Bergson controversy/connection see Bergson (Duration and Simultaneity), Mullarkey. On Bergson and physics see Papanicolau and Gunter Gunter , Pete A. Y. Bergson and the Evolution of Physics . Knoxville : U of Tennessee P , 1969 . [Google Scholar], Gunter, Čapek. 12. As I have explored elsewhere—in more or less detail and with greater or lesser extension—all of his works respond to this call, not only Matter and Memory but also Time and Free Will (1889), Creative Evolution (1907), El alma humana (1916), Mind-Energy (1919), Duration and Simultaneity (1922), The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932), The Creative Mind (1934), The World of Dreams (repub. 1958), and The Philosophy of Poetry (repub. 1959). 13. Deleuze (Bergsonism) masterfully captures the complexity of Bergson's thought. 14. Explored also as soul and body both in Matter and Memory (1896) and in an essay from Mind-Energy (1919). 15. The passage ends with the statement that "And that is why its surface [the body's surface], the common limit of the external and the internal, is the only portion of space which is both perceived and felt" (58), and as such should be considered key point of departure for understanding Maurice Merleau-Ponty's The Phenomenology of Perception (1945). It should be noted that Merleau-Ponty was a student of Bergson's in Paris and, although he often noted where he diverged from his former teacher, he referred to Bergson frequently in his works, and returned to a more arguably Bergsonian position in his late work published as The Visible and the Invisible (1973). There is, furthermore, a close relationship between the work of Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze. 16. This idea is important enough to warrant an almost identical discussion in the book's conclusion: "What is an affection? Our perception, we said, indicates the possible action of our body on others. But our body, being extended, is capable of acting upon itself as well as upon other bodies. Into our perception, then, something of our body must enter. When we are dealing with external bodies, these are, by hypothesis, separated from ours by a space, greater or less, which measures the remoteness in time of their promise or of their menace: this is why our perception of these bodies indicates only possible actions. But the more the distance diminishes between these bodies and our own, the more the possible action tends to transform itself into a real action, the call for action becoming more urgent in the measure and proportion that the distance diminishes. And when this distance is nil, that is to say when the body to be perceived is our own body, it is a real and no longer a virtual action that our perception sketches out … And that is why the surface of our body, the common limit of this and of other bodies, is given to us in the form both of sensations and of an image" (310–11). 17. This method is perhaps best articulated in the essay "Introduction to Metaphysics" (1903; included in The Creative Mind 1934). 18. The full quotation reads: "And yet we cannot even form the idea of discrete multiplicity without considering at the same time a qualitative multiplicity. When we explicitly count units by stringing them along a spatial line, is it not the case that, alongside this addition of identical terms standing out from a homogenous background, an organization of these units is going on in the depths of the soul, a wholly dynamic process, not unlike the purely qualitative way in which an anvil, if it could feel, would realize a series of blows from a hammer? … In a word, the process by which we count units and make them into a discrete multiplicity has two sides; on the one hand we assume that they are identical, which is conceivable only on condition that these units are ranged alongside each other in a homogeneous medium; but on the other hand, the third unit, for example, when added to the other two, alters the nature, the appearance and, as it were, the rhythm of the whole; without this interpenetration and this, so to speak, qualitative progress, no addition would be possible. Hence it is through the quality of quantity that we form the idea of quantity without quality" (122–3). 19. This phrase comes from Hayden Lorimer. 20. I do think there is a problem in applying Smith's comment (epigraph, above; drawn from Attali Attali J Noise: The Political Economy of Music Trans. Brian Massumi Manchester UP Manchester 1985 [Google Scholar]) too broadly, and this is that giving the priority to hearing over sight can have the effect of working to marginalize the non-hearing but vibrant culture of the Deaf (on Deaf culture in the Spanish context, see Fraser Fraser , Benjamin "On Mental and Cartographic Space: Belén Gopegui's La escala de los mapas, Bergson and the Imagined Interval." España Contemporánea 18.1 2005 : 7 32 . [Google Scholar] "Deaf Cultural Production in Twentieth-Century Madrid"). Nevertheless, it is important in the present context, especially in light of Bergson's comments on perception and affection, to tap into the relatively unexplored terrain that is the relevance of sound to geography. 21. Deleuze writes in his Proust and Signs that: "'One never knows how someone learns: but however one learns, it is always through the intermediary of signs, in losing one's time, and not through the assimilation of objective contents (PS 31; 21–2)" (quoted in Bogue Bogue, Ronald. 2003. Deleuze on Literature, New York; London: Routledge. [Google Scholar] 34). 22. Music of course had a great importance for many other scholars of Bergson's day, including Nietzsche and William James as Sacks notes in the book's concise but informative preface. 23. Levitin: "The cerebellum is the part of the brain that is involved closely with timing and with coordinating movements of the body. The word cerebellum derives from the Latin for 'little brain', and in fact, it looks like a small brain hanging down underneath your cerebrum (the larger, main part of the brain), right at the back of your neck. The cerebellum has two sides, like the cerebrum, and each is divided into subregions. From phylogenetic studies—studies of the brains of different animals up and down the genetic ladder—we've learned that the cerebellum is one of the older parts of the brain, evolutionarily speaking. In popular language, it has sometimes been referred to as the reptilian brain. Although it weighs only 10 percent as much as the rest of the brain, it contains 50 to 80 percent of the total number of neurons. The function of this oldest part of the brain is something that is crucial to music: timing" (174). 24. In my view, additional credence is incorrectly attributed to the priority given to language over music because of language's apparent representationality. By "apparent" I mean to say that language's representational appearance is a simplification, perhaps owing to the hegemony of Saussure's famous structuralist take on language, one that marginalized iconicity, metonymy and onomatopoeia, for example, in favor of the view of language as a system of arbitrary and metaphorical relationships (compare with Jakobson and Waugh Jakobson, Roman and Linda, Waugh. 1979. The Sound Shape of Language, Bloomington: Indiana UP. [Google Scholar]). Language is insufficiently understood by static representational models of meaning. 25. Theorists of capital have long touted the raw power of the punk rock show as a thorn in the side of the commodity economy and studies of performance have contributed likewise to performers' abilities to contest and challenge social norms of all sorts (For an introduction to punk see Mitchell chapter 6; Hebdige Hebdige, Dick. 1979. Subculture: The Meaning of Style, London: Routledge. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]; Duncombe Duncombe, Stephen. 1997. Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture, London: Verso. [Google Scholar]). 26. Greenwald's book opens with the following sentence: "The one fact no one seems to debate—or at least debate that loudly-is that emo emerged from hardcore …" (9). 27. This is to use Victor Turner's phrase from The Ritual Process (90). 28. Justin Crumbaugh Crumbaugh , Justin "An Aesthetic of Industrial Ruins in Bilbao: Daniel Calparsoro's Leap into the Void ('Salto al vacío') and Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum Bilbao." International Journal of Iberian Studies 14.1 2001 : 40 50 .[Crossref] , [Google Scholar] captures this same post-punk context in his superbanalysis of the urban film Salto al vacío by director Daniel Calparsoro whose stark presentation of the urban miasma of Bilbao presents a marked contrast with the urban renewal scheme headed by Frank Gehry's design of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. 29. These include Herri Batasuna/Euskal Herritarrok, Partido Nacionalista Vasco/Basque National Party, Euzko Alkastasuna, and Euzkadiko Ezkerra, Izquierda Unida for example. Lahusen 1993 warns the English-language reader of the paucity of sources in English, explores some of these Basque political divisions, and directs the reader to Sullivan, Ibarra Ibarra, Pedro. 1989. La evolución estratégica de ETA, Donostia. [Google Scholar], Waldmann and Darré and especially Jáuregui Jáuregui, Gurutz. 1986. National Identity and Political Violence in the Basque Country. European Journal of Political Research, 14: 587–605. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]. Since Lahusen's article was published many more English-language articles of interest have appeared, most notably in the volume Basque Cultural Studies (Douglass, Zulaika, Urza and White Douglass, William, Joseba, Zulaika, Carmelo, Urza and Linda, White. 2000. Basque Cultural Studies, Reno: U of Nevada P. [Google Scholar]) and other titles in Basque Studies printed by the University of Nevada Press, but also in the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, the Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies and the International Journal of Iberian Studies, among others. See also Linstroth Linstroth , J. P. "The Basque Conflict Globally Speaking: Material Culture, Media and Basque Identity in the Wider World." Oxford Development Studies 30.2 2002 : 205 22 .[Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]; Kasmir Kasmir , S. "'More Basque than You!' Class, Youth and Identity in an Industrial Basque Town." Identities 9.1 2002 : 39 68 . [Google Scholar]. 30. On their collaborative 2005 release, "Izkiriaturik Aurkitu Ditudan Gurak" [Deseos que encontré escritos/Desires I Discovered Written; the English translation is my own] there are lyrics in Polish as well. Even so, this is explicitly tied by the band to their rejection of English in particular: "Es una forma de reivindicarnos contra el monopolio del inglés en la música y en todos los ámbitos. Un monopolio absoluto en este mundo globalizado donde otras culturas se esconden ante el puto monolito cultural y comercial del inglés y de Estados Unidos [It is a form of vindication against the English-language monopoly in music and all areas. A total monopoly in this globalized world where other cultures are hidden from the fucking cultural and commercial monolith of English and the United States]" (Patón Rodriguez). Reviews and interviews with the band include: Quilez, Jorge X, Patón Rodriguez, Alfonso, I. Martín. The band also has a Myspace page. 31. Bergson writes: "How will the expressive or rather suggestive power of music be explained, if not by admitting that we repeat to ourselves the sounds heard, so as to carry ourselves back into the psychic state out of which they emerged, an original state, which nothing will express, but which something may suggest, viz. the very motion and attitude which the sound imparts to our body?" (44, emphasis added). 32. "There is a tendency in philosophy to separate the mind, the intellectual operations, from the passions, the emotions. This tendency moves into psychology, and thence into neuroscience. The neuroscience of music, in particular, has concentrated almost exclusively on the neural mechanisms by which we perceive pitch, tonal intervals, melody, rhythm, and so on, and, and, until recently, has paid little attention to the affective aspects of appreciating music" (Sacks 285).