<em>This Is the Piece</em>

Abstract

AUTONOMY AND HISTORICISM: THE FALSE ALTERNATIVE (ON THE REGIMES OF HISTORICITY OF ART) JACQUES RANCIÈRE (TRANSLATED BY PATRICK NICKLESON13) am neither a musician nor a historian of music. My relationship with music—contemporary or otherwise—is that of a listener who has never learned how it was made and what makes it such a pleasure to listen to. My reflections today bear not on a particular object in “the history of music” but on the conceptual knot that this seminar established between music as the name of an art and history as the name of a form of rationality that has been asked in which sense it is or is not entitled to think that art.14 I will interrogate the constitution of this knot and its conditions of possibility. I begin from the statement of the problem as formulated by François Nicolas in the inaugural meeting of the seminar.15 This problem articulates two essential relationships between music and history: a relationship of inclusion and a relationship of exclusion. On the one hand, history appears as the establishment of a relationship between the dimensions of time—present, past, and future. Music thus appears as one of the particular objects which falls under the concept I 330 Perspectives of New Music of history in general; the question is to know who has authority to do this history and from which relationship between the temporal dimensions it must be done: burden of the past, requirement of the present, or orientation towards a future. But on the other hand, music and history appear as two antagonistic terms. There is, says François Nicolas, a world of music, which forms a totality comprehensible in its interiority. But this is not of the world of history.16 This relationship of exclusion then makes a return to the relationship of inclusion and sets in opposition a good and a bad history of music. The good history captures music in its interiority, in its own world. The bad reports music to the exteriority of “history.” The first explains music by the musical. It understands a genealogy which refers works to other works and an archaeology which returns them to the materials of music. The second, “historicist” history, explains the musical by the non-musical: non-musical materials, biographical circumstances, social structures, etc. [Nicolas’s] statement of the problem therefore binds two ideas of history: history as globalizing determination of a relationship between the dimensions of time, and history as the term of a spatial type of opposition between an inside and an outside. It permits us already to see that history is not ever simply the name of an orientation of time. It is always at the same time the name of a distribution of the possible. But this second determination of time is introduced without being thematized. It appears under the form of a simple opposition: history is exterior, the authority of heteronomy; music is interior, the authority of autonomy. The problem can be posed another way: in what way does this division operate? It is accepted, at least initially, that the exterior is opposed to the interior. But things become more obscure when it comes to knowing in which space the frontier between the two is traced. Where exactly does this determination of history as exteriority come from? And how is an interiority defined? What permits one to say that music is a world? What does world mean? And what is the music that makes a world? What marks the frontier between musical works and non-musical works, musical material and nonmusical material? If I open a history of contemporary music, I will find no trace of those composers of chansons who have carefully applied the rules they learned in the Conservatoire. I will find there instead all sorts of composers who introduce in their works non-musical material—boat sirens, car horns, creaking doors, or pure breath. If I listen on the other hand to a radio show called France Musiques, there is little chance that I will hear any of these works. It is far more likely, in contrast, I will hear a performer of Bach or of Rameau improvising...