Here is the text of
the seven-minute talk I gave as one of five panelists at the Harry
Potter, Brands of Magic colloquium at the Sauder School of Business at the
University of British Columbia on October 29, 2015.
I first taught Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone
here at UBC in the winter term of 2002, in a course, not on children’s
literature, but on cultural theory, as a sort of case study around the impacts
and interpretation of popular media. With the publication of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire in
2000, and the release of the first Harry Potter film in November, 2001, the
publishing industry phenomenon arguably passed its tipping point, and Harry
Potter became a name – and a literary brand – that garnered global recognition
in the media. In the opening chapter of the first book, as the infant Harry is
being delivered to Privet Drive (you all know the story), the wizard Albus
Dumbledore tells his colleague at Hogwarts, Professor McGonagall, that he has
written a letter to the Dursleys that will enable them “to explain everything
to him when he’s older.” “Really Dumbledore,” Professor McGonagall replies,
“You
think you can explain all this in a letter? These people will never understand
him! He’ll be famous – a legend – I wouldn’t be surprised if today was known as
Harry Potter day in future – there will be books written about Harry – every
child in our world will know his name!” (15)
I can’t help but hear
this passage as J. K. Rowling articulating a playful fantasy of literary
success, as she sits unknown and unpublished scribbling in a notebook in The
Elephant House tea shop in Edinburgh in the mid-1990s. This passage not only
proves to be strangely and accurately prophetic, but it also sets up what I take
to be the core quandary of the whole series of books “written about Harry”: how
to understand him, how to read “Harry Potter.” That problem of knowing is
positioned initially here as a dichotomy, a choice between worlds: magical or
Muggle, Hogwarts or Privet Drive. But we have to recognize that, unpleasant as
the Dursleys are, Professor McGonagall is also off the mark herself: Harry
doesn’t so much choose as negotiate or mediate between those two poles. He
enables us, if you think about it, to read our way between the everyday and the
fantastical. Harry both enacts and embodies a specific set of reading
practices, a literacy; knowing his name means working to acquire that
competence, that mobility, that literacy.
In the three or so minutes that remain,
I’m going to sketch out three key aspects of that literacy, of what the Harry
Potter literary brand represents. Those three aspects of reading – you might
call them diagonals through this book, mediating between magical and Muggle
being – are the material, the heuristic and the haptic.
[The
Material]
When the Dursleys try to escape the
onslaught of Hogwarts admission letters addressed to Harry, they end up in “the
most miserable little shack you could imagine,” on what Rowling describes as “a
large rock way out to sea” (37). Significantly, both Dudley and his father are
certain that, whatever else, “there was no television in there.” Hagrid, as you
all know, still hand-delivers the letter to Harry amid flashes of lightening –
echoes, perhaps, of the scar on Harry’s forehead. Manuscript, signed text
inscribed on paper, is consistently counterpoised to electronic media,
especially television. (There is no TV at Hogwarts. Mass media, complete with
moving images, is displaced into the wizarding newspaper The Daily Prophet, an assemblage of stories, gossip and propaganda
that requires reading rather than viewing.) Magic, especially spells, appear to
require a return to the material object of the page, the book. And in 2001, too,
despite its commercial refiguring in Hollywood movies, “Harry Potter” seemed to
represented a resurgence of reading and of book-buying, an antidote to screen
and network. Books, as circulating and consumed objects, stood for a particular
intimate reactivation of the readerly imagination.
[The
Heuristic]
That reactivation is also figured in
the books themselves as heuristic: Harry, Hermione and Ron solve problems by
learning to be engaged readers. They decode text (as with the mirror of Erised,
for example), text we’re meant, arguably, to decode along with them. We’re
invited, you could say, to solve the books. But it's worth noting that Rowling
doesn’t offer up singular solutions, or “correct” answers. She doesn’t keep
silent because, following Professor McGonagall, that readers can’t understand,
can’t cross into the hermetic realm of magical privilege. Rather, it’s because
the process of puzzling out what Harry means to discover is pluralistic and
divergent. You might recall the Hogwarts school song, which declares that we
will “learn until our brains all rot,” is not choral so much as “bellowed”
cacophony, with everyone picking their own favourite tune: an enactment of
differential community, a solution that won’t resolve or homogenize.
[The
Haptic]
Harry
Potter doesn’t so much refuse electronic media as reinsert a haptic interface,
through the material technology of the book, into the various circuits of
public consumption. Books are tactile; they have to be handled, touched, their
pages turned. The demise of Quirrell (and the name suggests, aside from
quarrelsomeness, a quire, a fold of pages within a book) has to do with his
incapacity to read Harry, to interpret what Harry embodies or even to see the
mark of Harry’s mother’s love on his skin. That mark, as Dumbledore tells us,
is “not a scar” and leaves “no visible sign” (216). The haptic feedback – the
touch – that proves to be “agony” for Voldemort and Quirrell isn’t something
that we, as readers, need fear – we’re protected, in a sense, by the opaque surface,
the skin, of the pages before us. But it functions, nonetheless, as a form of
transmission, an ionizing, organic ether, that the lightning-bolt scar on
Harry’s forehead metonymically displaces and displays. The transformative power
of that touch, the shift from the distracted reception of screened images to
the proactive thoughtful connection to a living world, is what reading Harry
Potter might just be about.
[This is the draft text of a paper I am set to present at the 2015 Guelph Jazz Festival Colloquium, on Wednesday, September 16.] The collective
trajectory of this year’s colloquium links practicing various forms of improvisation
to nurturing various forms of intersubjective well-being. By
attending—carefully, critically and briefly—to solo and to collaborative
electro-acoustic performances by the British saxophonist Evan Parker, I want to
gesture at the nascent work of remediation that Lisbeth Lipari has recently
called “an ethics of attunement,” a close listening that cultivates
compassionate alterity within an attentive body: an akroasis—an audition, an audience—that provides a resonant and
differential basis for the possibility of what Jean-Luc Nancy has provocatively
named an “inoperative community,” a version for me of what Alphonso Lingis calls
The Community of Those Who Have Nothing
in Common, of our conflicted and diverse human species. Nancy’s
philosophical interrogation of listening to music (as “the art of the hope for
resonance”) offers contingent conceptual support with which it’s possible to
assess the sensibly vibrant sounding of interstices, both between and within
each human frame, that constitutes Evan Parker’s improvising.
Claims about well-being and health tend
to presuppose an uninterrogated sense of what constitutes a proper,
well-ordered body. Rather than extend a critique of what Michel Foucault might
have called the “care of self” and its biopolitics, I am going to premise my remarks
on improvisation and well-being by assuming that corporeality may also be understood
as porous and conflicted instead of individuated, discrete or holistic, and
that this porosity is a founding condition both of co-creativity and of lived
community. Reworking a Deleuzean pluralism, Annemarie Mol writes of a medical
practice that addresses and heals the “body multiple,” which she presents as an
“intricately coordinated crowd” that “hangs together” through “various forms of
coordination” (55). Following on Maurice
Merleau-Ponty, David Abram describes “the boundaries of a living body” as “open
and indeterminate; more like membranes than barriers, they define a surface of
metamorphosis and exchange” (42). I’m interested in pursuing with some rigour
those “forms of coordination”—or the textures of that porosity—at the level of
acoustic experience, as a humane and ethically preferable set of cultural
interactions.
Lisbeth Lipari proposes
“interlistening” as a term for “the multiple dimensions of embodied
consciousness that vibrate in the dance of conversation between [among?] people
talking” (161). Her aim is to delineate discursive practices that listen
otherwise, that attend to the presence of others, even as they enable speech.
“Listening otherwise,” she writes,
challenges
the ego and the illusion of control and sees how the distortions that arise
from our insistence on innocence, certainty, and understanding damage our
capacity for compassion. . . . [L]istening
otherwise . . . suspends the willfulness of self- and foreknowledge in
order to receive the singularities of the alterity of the other” (Lipari 185,
186).
Heavily influenced by
Emmanuel Levinas, Lipari also models her auditory ethics on the music theory of
Hans Kayser, whose concept of akroasis
(the Ancient Greek word for “hearing”) articulates a “theory of world
harmonics” as a holistic gestalt-series rooted in Pythagorean acoustics (Lipari
27). Kayser appears to mitigate dissonances in attunement, and prefiguresby several decades R. Murray
Schafer’s disciplined “ear-cleaning” of European music . I’m
less sanguine about what I know of Kayser, however; without refusing the
hopeful tenor of his thinking, I worry that he only re-instates a cult of primeval
innocence, a re-tooled Ptolemaic naïveté. It helps me, instead, partially to
recover the etymology of akroasis,
which occurs in Aristotle as a term for audience and hearing: notably, not in The Poetics nor in the sections of his Politics focused on music, but in his Rhetoric. The ἀκροατής (akroates), frequently
translated as “hearer,” is actively implicated in discursive exchange: “Now
the hearer (akroatēn) must
necessarily be either a mere spectator or a judge (kritēs), and a judge either of things past or of things to come.”
That is, listening—at least, to speech—is inherently active and deliberative,
and those deliberations, within a polytemporal reciprocity, include critical
intellection. Akroatic listening, close listening as thinking, becomes more
agonistic than syncretic, more unsettling than epideictic. (Compare George
Lewis: “In its marginalization, its often-unseen, intangible presence, which
generates new discourses, in its mobility and facility with hybridization, and
in its locus, the contestatory space where difference can [be] and is enacted,
improvisation’s general importance to the underlying health of the musical
ecosphere and the public commons must be recognized, valued and protected
[138].”)
In a 2014 interview, Sonny
Rollins repudiates any sort of reflexive intellection as disruptive to
improvising, invoking the demanding temporality of playing: “I
don't want to overtly think about anything, because you can't think and play at
the same time — believe me, I've tried it (laughs). It goes by too fast.”
Rollins appears to be suggesting that, when you listen to yourself as you play,
you lose your through-line, lose the formal sense of your music. But his point,
I think, isn’t to romanticize or mystify his artistry—he focuses on his lapses,
not his genius—but to assess the cognitive velocity at which that agon, that
deliberation, can even occur. What Lipari calls compassionate openness wants to
happen not as immediacy but on the fleeting lip of the present, closer to
reflex than reflexive. Jean-Luc Nancy refers to “sonorous time” as “a present
in waves on a swell, not in a point on a line; it is a time that opens up, that
is hollowed out, that is enlarged or ramified, that envelops or separates, that
becomes or is turned into a loop, that stretches out or contracts, and so on”
(13). The challenge, the risk posed by such a hysteresis, is not merely the
neglect of what is other—and this is perhaps why thinking about solo music,
about the improvised solo, helps us to re-conceptualize otherness as such, not
as a condition of the co-presence of individuals but even as a porosity of self,
of voice—but also an issue of technique, of the virtuosic coordination of
enharmonic singularities as they pass in and out of our membranous bodies.
Listening, writes Nancy, “—the opening stretched toward the register of the
sonorous, then to its musical amplification and composition—can and must appear
to us not as a metaphor for access to self, but as the reality of this access,
a reality consequently indissociably ‘mine’ and ‘other’ . . .” (12).
I want to read Evan Parker’s solo
saxophone technique as a crucial instance of this intensely vacillating
subjectivity (if that’s the right term for a solo voice), of the surging
disavowal of self sounding itself. Here is an excerpt of the solo music, recorded
without overdubbing, from his 1989 album Conic Sections:
Writing in the early 1990s, John Corbett describes Evan Parker’s
seemingly linear, monophonic instrument as more of an “assemblage” of
body—“[f]ingers, mouth, tongue, teeth, lungs”—and horn—reed, ligature, keys,
pads, bell—“constellated in such a way as to break the seeming unity of melodic
expression” (82). But in Evan Parker’s solo playing, both live and on
recordings, those fractures are not ends in themselves, and rather initiate—as
what Lipari describes as “challenges” to passive listening—the possibility of
tonal and linear multiplication, of what the reedist calls, with measured
self-deprecation, a form of “polyphony”: “There’s a more complex sense of
linearity,” he says, “to the point where the line folds back on itself and
assumes some of the proportions of vertical music, and some of the
characteristics of polyphonic music” (qtd. In Corbett 83). Combining circular breathing,
cross-fingering, tonguing and biting the reed, Evan Parker is able to generate
layers of overtones and nearly-simultaneous contrapuntal arpeggios at high
velocity, effectively producing a continuum of cascading choruses from a single
breath. But while Corbett is keen to endorse Evan Parker’s virtuosity and
instrumental mastery, he also notes, as the saxophonist himself does, how
accident and uncertainty find their way inevitably into any performance,
subverting claims to absolute technique or intention and undermining the
“notion of the unitary, intending subject”—that is, of self-expression—in
improvisation. As Evan Parker puts it succinctly in a 1997 interview with
Martin Davidson,“It's to do with
layering stuff that I don't know on top of stuff that I do know.” Here, I
think, is exactly the looping of self and other, of expressive intention and
unruly, noisy sound, that Jean-Luc Nancy describes as listening. Evan Parker’s
descriptions of his improvisatory practice align remarkably closely with Nancy’s
philosophical investigations of listening:
It's
clear to me that if you can imagine something, you can find a technical way to
do it, but if you can't imagine it, whether or not there is a technical
solution never occurs to you because there's no need to. So it's very necessary
to listen closely to what happens when you try to do things, because usually at
the fringes of what you're producing is something that you're not really in
control of - that there is a central thing that you are fully in control of,
and then a kind of halo of suggested other possibilities which have to come
with the central thing that you're in control of, whether it's a wisp of breath
escaping from the side of the embouchure, or an overtone that you could push
harder, or some key noise which you can't escape. There's always something
there, and if you're listening at the fringes of the sound as well as at the
centre of the sound, then you can be led to other things and other
possibilities.
The collision of
self-possessed declamation and open-eared deliberation in what he calls
“trying”—and what I’d suggest in fact takes the form of a musical essay—points
up the irresolute multiplicity at the edges of extemporaneous sound, its
tensile present tense.
Gently pushing back at Sonny Rollins, I
hear Evan Parker—playing at velocity, going by too fast—as negotiating between
an organic immediacy and an akroatic self-scrutiny, as both listening to
himself and not in the same breath. Corbett calls this tensioning a form of
“research” (85), a science or an intellection, and I’m inclined to agree: this
music is, it’s my contention, one instance of practice-based research into the
possibility of inoperative community. So, to think about community, and to
close my remarks today, I want to listen to a recording of a recent performance
of Evan Parker’s electro-acoustic septet at the Festival International de Musique Actuelle in Victoriaville in May,
2014. Evan Parker supplies a typically ironic sleeve note: “My art of
composition consists in choosing the right people and asking them to
improvise.” He playfully refuses the “rampant egomania” both of the improvising
soloist and of the composer, preferring an unregimented collectivity. At the
same time, the consistent spatial arrangement of the septet onstage—which can
be seen both in the inner sleeve of the VICTO cd and in the video taken of a
performance at Roulette in New York City, positions Evan Parker at the centre
and apex of the group, facing out like the others but occupying the
conductor-leader’s chair. There’s much to note about this music, but I want to
make just a few points. The three laptops to Evan Parker’s left are able both to
sample and re-figure the live improvisations and to contribute other electronic
sound textures—this is the key concept of most of Parker’s electro-acoustic
groups—which means that the instrumentalist is displaced across the ensemble.
On the Victoriaville recording, Evan Parker doesn’t initiate the performance,
and—if my ears are right—doesn’t even enter as an contributing voice until the
six-minute mark: not through diffidence or even deferral, necessarily, but as
an audible disavowal—silence amid sound—of egocentric voicing: he starts by
listening rather than playing. A version of his own solo practice emerges into
the swirling sonic layers of the ensemble around eighteen minutes into the
performance, combining both self-parody—inserting his long-established
unaccompanied voice into the group dynamic, which both pushes the tutti back, but also opens up a series
of interstices into which other voices might enter. As a model of community,
what the group manages around this moment of solo horn is what Jean-Luc Nancy
calls “a mutual interpellation od singularities prior to any address in
language,” a corporeally-based multiplicitous nudging that, despite the
reflective stillness of many of the players onstage – particularly the three at
their laptops, who enact the reflexive, deliberative aspect of the music, as
opposed to the apparent organicism of the improvisers to his right: the point,
for me, is the co-creation of a virtual in-coherence, a playing apart together
that inheres in the shared differences among the ensemble members, the byplay
between egocentric voice and a yielding to the voices of others. Community,
Nancy writes, is not the panacea of delusive“communion . . . nor even a communication as this is understood to exist
between subjects. But these singular beings are themselves constituted by
sharing, they are distributed and placed, or rather spaced, by the sharing that makes them others” (IC 25). Well-being, as listening otherwise, means neither
self-satisfied holism nor ludic conflict, but a sharing that nurtures our mutual
unknowing.
Works
Cited
Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and
Language in a More-Than-Human
World. New York:
Vintage,
1997.
Corbett, John. Extended Play: Sounding Off from John
Cage to Dr. Funkenstein.
Durham: Duke UP, 1994.
Lipari, Lisbeth. Listening, Thinking, Being: Toward an
Ethics of Attunement.
University Park: Pennsylvania
State
UP, 2014.
Mol, Annemarie. The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical
Practice.
Durham: Duke UP, 2002.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. Listening. 2002. Tr. Charlotte Mandel.
This is a test video
for a series of video-podcast discussions of poems and of media for my courses
this fall. In April, for National Poetry Month, I decided to discuss and then
read one of my favourite poems, the sonnet “Fourteen” by Marilyn Hacker. (A blog post here re-types the text of the poem.) There is plenty that I leave out in what I say: the poem is a brilliantly
complex and resonant piece of writing, a kind of “presentation piece” as Hacker
might have put it. The last line always moves me in ways that are difficult to
capture in any formal analysis. And here I don’t really broach the difficult
gender-politics that the poem interrogates. I have taught this poem a number of
times in first-year lecture courses, introductions to literary studies, so the
video is pitched as a kind of introduction to the text.
