Introduction

Summary

What new problematics does a turn to music animate in Rancière’s political-aesthetic thought? What existing problematics can be newly attended to, and what new deployments can be imagined? What musicalities are revealed in his thought and writings by such a turn? What, in short, is the role of music, of the musical, of musicking for Rancière, either explicitly or implicitly? And backing up slightly, what is the role of sound? Is sound the medium in which the art of the muses is inextricably embedded? Or can music reach beyond the sonic sphere in the course of its various metamorphoses? Music is overtly present in Rancière's writing only very rarely; indeed, it has become a truism that Rancière does not have much to say about music. But music is often tacitly – mutely – present in his thought, and we can see how it rises to the surface as a point of intersection and resonance between the arts, through or as musicality.

Rancière's multifaceted enquiry into the relationship between aesthetics and politics offers many new prospects for musical insight, research and practice, as the chapters that comprise this volume will demonstrate. Conversely, music offers a rich terrain – a rich scenographic field1 – for continuing to develop Rancière’s political/aesthetic thought. Music's essentially temporal, relational status, its modes of expressing and engendering (often non- or paralinguistic) meaning, the lines it draws between philosophical and political (in conventional usage) expression, the ontological and epistemological questions it continues to raise: all of these are fertile ground both for engagement via Rancièrean conceptual apparatuses and for developing, refining and transforming those apparatuses. Some of these themes reflect why music has been philosophically valuable for so many canonical philosophers, an abbreviated list of whom must include Rousseau, Schiller, Schopenhauer, Hegel, Nietzsche, Bergson, Husserl, Adorno, Bloch, Langer, Jankélévitch, and Deleuze and Guattari. Because music's particular mode of temporal extension does not break down into basic syntactic units in any fully agreed-upon way, it provides a valuable illustration of an irreducible temporality that extends to other modes of existence. Likewise with music’s fundamental relationality: sounds acquire meaning through their interactions with other sounds, words and images, and listeners interact with those sound-constellations in ways that both express and challenge the historical and sociocultural contexts in which they find themselves.