Relationality

Notes on the conversation I had with Mike during our walk back from the cemetery:

• The main question I’m exploring is how music invokes human relationality by enacting or representing relational modes, the stances by which people relate to one another, and specifically how lyric represents a certain relational mode that emerges, as I’ll explain, from the second-person standpoint.
• I’m looking at how this question gets explored in a particular context, that of musical modernism in the early twentieth century, focusing on a handful of works that seem to me especially insightful.
• The works’ insights emerge largely due to their engagement with their context in music and intellectual history. Another way of saying this is that the works’ insights can’t be separated from their canonicity: their historical awareness and participation in the Western Art Music canon, and the accompanying reception practices and aesthetic discourses. That’s why I’ll spend such a significant amount of time establishing the context of these works, which are positioned on what each composer described as a transition between eras—in which what was being transformed was the structure of relationality.
• Another way of saying this: to say that my thesis is about how music invokes relationality doesn’t capture the fact that there are many world-views from which this question is a bogus one—without stakes. But there are certain world-views from which this question matters a great deal. What are the perspectives from which we can see why this question matters? Several such perspectives are relevant to the works I’m studying: that of musical modernism, that of turn-of-the-century lied culture, and that of aesthetic philosophy of melody, song, and voice reaching at least as far back as the Romantic era. One of my tasks is to describe those perspectives, to try to step into those perspectives so that I can better articulate why, from those perspectives, the question of how music invokes relationality is so significant.
• I’m not talking about the high-school writing lesson that demands you to explain “so what?” because the demand to explain “so what” assumes that the topic you’re exploring is, on some level, of universal interest, when it likely isn’t. I’m saying that, my thesis doesn’t just explain how lyric in music invokes second-person relationality; it explains how this comes to be a question worth asking, indeed a question that matters a great deal, in a certain milieu.
• I think there are three basic relational modes. In the first mode, one sees others in terms of function or transaction. It might not really matter, from this standpoint, whether another person has an inner life or what they experience. This mode arises from a third-person standpoint: relating to others in the third-person. In another mode, one sees others in terms of similarity to oneself. One person bonds with another because of their shared identity, interest, or experience. This mode arises from a first-person standpoint. From a third-person standpoint, I relate to the other person more-or-less as an object or a machine; from a first-person standpoint, I relate to the other person as a version of myself or member of my tribe.
• Finally, there is the relational mode that arises from a second-person standpoint. But this mode is not as easy to describe. How do I relate to another person in a way that can be reduced neither to function/transaction nor to identification? What does it mean to relate to another person face-to-face, truly recognizing them as “you,” not “they” nor “I’ nor “we”?
• Lyric, I’ll be arguing, is uniquely capable of exploring the second-person relational mode, because it can flicker between modes—and, I’m suggesting, there’s something about the second-person that is intrinsically flickery, unstable unlike the other two modes. For instance, lyric might invoke the second-person only to demonstrate how slippery that stance is, how easily it shape-shifts into one of the other two stances. I start off addressing you, but I end up projecting my own experience into yours. I start off addressing you, but I end up talking about myself. I start off addressing you, but I end up objectifying you. Lyric is uniquely capable of exploring how difficult it is to sustain second-person relationality. A big part of its technique is to be itself a bifocality between first- and third-person, subject and object, voice and thing, showing that you only get to the second-person by hopping back and forth between the two sides.
• One of the cool things about thinking in terms of second-person relationality is that it’s totally different from the more commonly expressed liberal ideal of people relating to one another as equals. In many of the best examples of second-person relationality represented in lyric, the addresser and addressee are not at all on equal footing. You can have honorifics and humilifics: second-person address can point up or down the status ladder. And you can even have one of the two, addresser or addressee, not be a “person” at all, but a thing, or an abstraction, or someone that isn’t or never was alive—hence apostrophe or prosopopeia. My point is that the way lyric invokes second-person relationality doesn’t have specific agendas about political organization. It’s only a reminder of the existence second-person relationality, and its fragility.
• Was lyric always like this? Perhaps; if so, lyric discourse and reception culture, especially in musical contexts, lost sight of this truth during the 19th and 20th centuries. But lyric, given its unique role in invoking the second person, is also uniquely sensitive to reception culture.
• I’m realizing that I don’t agree with Benjamin that lyric poetry was possible in the past because of integrated experience, at least not if that means integrated subjectivity. Then again, what he’s saying is that subjectivity gets integrated through social integration. Is it the difference between being able to relate as “we” vs. having to relate as “you and I”?