Shadows of Sound: Music, Pedagogy and Writing the Inaudible

Abstract

This thesis is an exploration of what is at stake in education as a site that privileges notions of development, efficiency, and progress. The stance taken is that educational critique has been absorbed into the performative mechanisms of a postmodern system that relies on differentiation and critique to enhance its own performance. When critique no longer functions as an antithesis to the existing order, it is necessary to explore possibilities of resistance to an ethos of efficient performance by other means. Rather than engage with a critical reading of education directly, this thesis utilises the writings of Jean-François Lyotard as the primary source of 'data' and inspiration. Beginning with an analysis of performativity as the quest for optimal performance, it delves into the dark subterranean layers mined in Lyotard's later writings in search for a trace of what remains irreducible to all apparatuses of articulation, inscription, and archiving. In line with Lyotard, the role of art in bearing witness to the inaudible as artistic 'matter' in time and space is investigated, and this exploration is extended further to a study of the mute gesture that gives art and music its power and artistry. Through a close reading of Lyotard's writings on art, the mysterious and enigmatic 'presence' that inhabits art and remains always elusive and ungraspable is investigated. The visual metaphor of shadows throughout the text is deliberate in its evocation of the artistic event as fleeting, temporal, and in some important ways, undefinable. The mute affect provoked by art, and the investigation into Lyotard's fascination with a zone of infancy as a state of deprivation before language, are explored as potentially educative instances that honour the singularity of the event, and uphold the unfettered openness needed to witness it. The significance of Lyotard's interpretation of music in this thesis, reaches beyond a merely acoustic phenomenon. It is argued the concept of a mutic 'sounding' within the gesture of musical sound, paired with the notion of timbre as the intransitive artistry of this gesture, opens an interesting space in which to consider a pedagogy that resonates beyond our known world, toward an inaudible space of the unknown. In sum, the writing calls for an attentive form of listening that reminds us that an education system grounded in knowledge and certainty, runs the risk of forgetting the condition for the possibility of this certainty, is the mute inarticulacy of the inaudible.