I found Grosz’s second chapter to be much more readable than her first, butmore importantly, much more cogent & coherent than Haraway’s introduction (while dealing with many of the same topics.
Through a reiteration of Deleuze, Grosz asserts that, “*Art, philosophy, andscience each erect a plane, a sieve, over chaos”(28). When she then claims,”Of all the arts, music is the most immediately moving, the most visceraland contagious in its effects…” the adjectival aspects that are assigned tomusic must in fact be describing its plane/sieve and not, in some way, thechaos of music itself. Contagion is easier seen in music than say,literature or painting — it happens quite often that a room full of peoplewho hear music may respond to it in a way that is immediately andeffectively displayed (dance, singing along, clapping, other actions ofbodies in motion). It’s less easy to see artists or writers adopting thesame plane as the art/literature that they encounter — probably because theproduction of music itself contains an immediacy that’s lacking in anapproach to creativity that involves some amount of lag between thebeginning of the creation and its finished form. Furthermore, people aren’tgenerally privy to seeing each letter appear on a page of a novel as it’swritten; we do, however, get a certain measure of access to music as it iscreated (even if it is a performance of a prewritten piece). Listening tomusic is like walking down that hallway in the intro to the TV show GetSmart — we go through a series of doors, only each of these doors is asieve through which we must pass to get to the next movement, to understandthe final crescendo. *
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*Whether music derives from language (self-preservation) or language frommusic (sexual-selection) may be a false dichotomy. If a bird’s song eitherwarns about an approaching predator or sounds like a Top-40 Radio Hit maydepend on whether you’re a bird or a person. Frankly, without tone-reliantphoneme blocking (being able to tell the difference between the beginning ofone word and the end of another), language acquisition is impossible. Atsome level, it isn’t difficult to imagine an utterance that straddles thisbinary barrier — a language lacking tonal differentiation doesn’t seemlikely to develop, nor does a pre-linguistic music seem likely to spreadaround the globe (the argument might be made that environmental pressuresforced the independent rise of music across geographic regions.*
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*Sexual dimorphism, or “the differences in vocal physiology between the twosexes” (31) is often employed by evolutionary biologists to explainbehavioral differences. That is, females can be choosy because they haveless eggs than males have sperm. But I’m not sure that the logic holds inGrosz’s analysis: males can ??? because they have bigger vocal cords thanfemales. It’s much easier to explain dimorphism in terms of survival(breeding, eating). Which may actually be what’s happening. It doesn’tmake much sense to talk about sexual vs. natural selection — isn’t sexualselection an expression of the survival instinct? Or is natural selectionlimited to the individual’s most basic needs (sleep, food, water)? *
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*Waxing poetic, Grosz asserts that, “Living beings are vibratory beings:vibration is their mode of differentiation, the way they enhance and enjoythe forces of the earth **itself” (33). This sounds nice, but I don’treally know what it means. What other modes of differentiation arethere? Whatabout nonliving beings? Are there other methods of differentiation? Howdoes vibration enhance the forces of the earth? How does vibration helpenjoyment of the forces of the earth? What are the forces of the earthitself? She continues to say that music, “**serves the vaguer purposes **ofevocative intensification and pleasure” and later that music “**bring(s)something new to the world, create something that has no other purpose thanto intensify, to experience **itself” (39).***
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*I’ll return to a complaint that I had about previous readings — looking atthings at a species level may miss some important individual facts: if,say, there were a musician who were going to jump off of a building butinstead wrote a devastating sonata, isn’t that an act of survival? Or mustit be explained as the musician excessive attempt at impressing a musicianof the opposite sex? For surely there’s a better way to look at art than asexcess. I know that after Post-Modernism everyone’s searching for a way toimbue an utter lack of meaning with meaning (often by claiming thatmeaninglessness is wonderful!)….*
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*I especially like when Grosz starts to talk about Uexkull’s view that “ananimal is not immersed wholesale in a given milieu, but at best engages withcertain features that are of significance to it, that counterpoint, in somesense, with its own organs” (40). I think this is what Lingus was trying tosay about the walls/ocean/scientist/sailor analogy — that there’s somethingto the boundaries of environments that at a certain point dictates what canbe understood in those environments, whether the environment is the humanbody, a mansion, or a ship at sea.*