Hélène Cixous, écriture féminine and Musical Analysis E-Book

Joyce Shintani

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Musicology. Gendertronics
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 86

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

Out of roiling French feminist theory in the 1970s, philosopher and writer Hélène Cixous developed the practice of lecture feminine – based on the notion of écriture féminine – as an analytic approach in her own seminars. In musicology, it wasn’t until the 1990s that gender studies introduced new attitudes as methods. Might Cixous’ lecture féminine serve as a historically rooted analytic approach for musicology and multimedia today? A theory of otherness that brings the body into play with the intellect, that questions the validity of the text, that poetically encourages a collective and respectful approach to reading with an abundance of interpretations: All of these notions and more are included in lecture féminine. The first extensive attempt to adapt lecture féminine to music analysis, the current volume offers experts and students in the areas of music, musicology, gender studies, and philosophy a concise introduction to this ‘method’. Terms such as feminine, the other, and phallogocentrism are discussed in relationship to poststructuralism, Lacan, Freud, and other thought.

Leseprobe

A native of Los Angeles California, Joyce Shintani pursued a career in conducting specializing in contemporary music until 1997, when she entered the music industry at Universal Edition Vienna and BMG Munich. When Napster brought the fusion and ultimate demise of BMG, she completed her dissertation on Gendertronics in Paris and taught ‘music theory and aesthetics after 1945’ at the University of Design Karlsruhe until her retirement in 2012. She remains active as author in Stuttgart.

Contents

Note to the Reader

Introduction

Exorbitant method:

Écriture féminine

1.1 History

1.2 Topics

1.3 Aspect: The ‘Other’ (

l’autre

)

1.4 Aspect: What is ‘feminine’?

1.5 Aspect: Lacan

Reception in Musicology

Lecture féminine?

Bibliography

Illustrations

Figure 1 - Freud's Concept of Mind

Figure 2 - Constitution/Structure of the Subject (Ego, moi)

Figure 3 - Lacan's Borromean Knot

Figure 4 - Cixous' Seminar

Note to the Reader

This text, slightly revised and published here for the first time, was written as Chapter 2 of my dissertation, Gendertronics. Toward A ‘Lecture Féminine’ of Emerging Musical Technologies and Their Aesthetics – Gerhard Stäbler, Terre Thaemlitz, Miss Kittin, which was defended at the Université Paris-Est, France, in 2008.

To my satisfaction, extracts of the dissertation have already been published. Sections dealing with métissage of methods, the poststructuralist Subject, German notions of the Subject, and Gerhard Stäbler appeared in the Revue Filigrane (2010); and in the book live · the opposite · daring (2015) sections dealing with métissage of methods (again), with Stäbler’s evolving musical Subject, and with an application of lecture féminine to his musical works were published.

Sadly, the thirty-odd pages I devoted to method based on the work of author and philosopher Hélène Cixous were left, so to speak, on the cutting room floor.

Inasmuch as Hélène Cixous’ thought has not been widely applied to musical analysis, I have decided to publish these pages as a monograph that at once complements the already published material and also, with its bibliographical references, can serve as stand-alone introduction to Cixous and her work.

This makes parts of the dissertation available in three separate publications, small packets of digestible thought, but interrupts the original flow of ideas. Adventurous readers can find the first half of the dissertation in its entirety as pdf on my website www.joyceshintani.com.

Hélèn Cixous developed lecture féminine based on her theory of écriture féminine and used it to approach texts with students in her own seminars. It admits as equally valid the viewpoints of multiple readers and encourages the individual reader to arrive at conclusions from that multiplicity. Therefore, I have made wide use of quotations – different ‘readings’ – from which you, reader, may draw your inferences.

Each of the artists treated in the disseration has elements in his or her oeuvre that make reference to elements of the theory of écriture féminine, thus making their work good examples for lecture féminine. These elements can be summarized as follows:

Changing concept of the Subject

Stäbler

Changing concept of musical material

Stäbler

Interstices of gender

Thaemlitz

Sex as weapon

Thaemlitz

Appropriation of means of production

Thaemlitz

(Bi-)sexuality

Thaemlitz

Rhizome subject

Thaemlitz

Corporeal electronics

Miss Kittin

Writing the body

Miss Kittin

After the methodological introduction published here, I intend to issue separately three remaining sections of Gendertronics: a history of electronica, a lecture féminine of work by composer Terre Thaemlitz, and one of DJ Miss Kitten.

My heartfelt thanks to Mme Hélène Cixous for her inspiration and for her kind permission to include previously unpublished notes here, as well as to Alan Hyde for his encouragement and challenging reading of my text.

Joyce Shintani Stuttgart 2016

Introduction

All biographies like all autobiographies like all narratives tell one story in place of another story (Cixous 1997e:178).

In previous writings, I have traced the paths within poststructuralism that led up to and point to Hélène Cixous’ concept of écriture féminine. Here, it is neither my aim to furnish a comprehensive history of Cixous, her thought, or her works, nor to discuss their vast reception, as these areas have been more than amply covered by authors elsewhere.1 An exception to this is the realm of musicology, which is treated in Section 2 below. My goal is to interpret Cixous’ écriture féminine following the poststructuralist notion that there is no one, single Truth, only the interaction of different interpretations. The generous use of quotations here provides the reader with a spectrum of some interpretations.

Thus, I strive to communicate to you, my reader, my understanding of what écriture féminine can be: Looking at its historical influences, we will see what its themes are and how it can work. One of the characteristics of écriture féminine is its refusal to be defined. Hélène Cixous is clear from the very beginning:

It is impossible at present to define a feminine practice of writing. And this impossibility will continue, for one can never theorize this practice, never enclose it, never codify it; which doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. […] This practice takes place and will take place in areas that are not subjected to theoretical-philosophical mastery (LM:8832).

Cixous found adequate places, lieux, to unfold her own écriture feminine: in literary works, often with unconventional forms, in the theater, and in her teaching activity. I offer here a historical orientation with a number of particular ‘aspects’, followed by a large number of ‘topics’ from écriture féminine. In my other publications on Gendertronics, many of the topics are thrashed out in discussions of musical works. But I begin with a few biographic elements, because for Hélène Cixous, what is recounted here

[…] (including what is forgotten and omitted) is for me inseparable from writing. There is continuity between my childhoods, my children, and the world of writing – or of the narrative (Rootprints, eng., pp. 203-204). Her speech, even when “theoretical” or political, is never simple or linear or “objectified”, generalized: she draws her story into history (LM:881).

Hélène Cixous was born in 1937 in Oran in West Algeria, which at the time was still a French colony. The town of Oran had been founded in 903 by Moorish traders and was long under Spanish rule. Her father’s family had “followed the classic trajectory of the Jews chased from Spain to Morocco”.3 In 1831, Oran fell to the French. After the final bloody conquest of Algeria in the early 1900s, the French government confiscated communally held land, and European settlers moved in to farm it, a common practice of colonization. Prior to the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962), Oran had one of the highest proportions of Europeans of any city in North Africa.

Cixous’ background, therefore, was a plurality of cultures. “When I was little I lived in a city full of neighborhoods, of peoples, of languages.” But in addition, she says she had a “double childhood”: Her father was a French citizen of Spanish descent; he was a businessman and played the violin. Her mother was of German and Slovak (Austro-Hungarian) descent. “Consequently, although I am profoundly Mediterranean of body, of appearance, of jouissances, all my imaginary affinities are Nordic.” The German grandmother lived with the family, and Hélène grew up hearing French, Spanish, German, Arabic … and her father forged “in a Joycian way” a play of signifiers and jokes on the German language “that became part of the family idiom.… Perhaps the verbal virtuosity or versatility that there is in my writing comes to me from my father.” But her father is also a source of disturbance for her. A doctor, he contracts tuberculosis; and thereafter “there is a sort of veiled death in the house, the effects of which we receive only because my father reserves himself, physically, in his relations with us. He avoids holding us in his arms. This produces uninterpretable effects of distance for us.”

When she was 18, she came to Paris to prepare for university studies; the Algerian War of Independence had just begun. In Algeria, Cixous had felt distant from her origins, “I was born so far from my beginnings”. And as Jews under the French Vichy regime, even in Algeria, the Cixous family experienced anti-Semitism. But it was in Paris that Cixous experienced the new culture as an outsider, as a not-belonger, as an ‘other’.

[In the Lycée Lakanal] I felt the true torments of exile. Not before. Neither with the Germanys, nor with the Englands, nor with the Africas, I did not have such an absolute feeling of exclusion, of interdiction, of deportation. I was deported right inside the class.

In Algeria I never thought I was at home, or that Algeria was my country, or that I was French. This was part of the exercise of my life: I had to play with the question of French nationality which was aberrant, extravagant. I had French nationality when I was born. But no one ever took themselves for French in my family.

In the extract above, not only do we see Cixous’ profound sense of exile, but also of her sense of urgency in dealing with her ‘outsider-ness’. It became the exercise of her life, she had to engage with the question. The daily matter of feeling ‘outside’ necessitated her wrestling with the notions behind it. Inside, outside – it was her first large literary theme, one that later would be combined with sexual politics.

Soon after her arrival in Paris, Cixous met another Algerian émigré with whom she shared the feeling of being outside – socially and philosophically – until his death in 2006: Jacques Derrida. With geographical modification, Gustav Mahler’s quote on exile could fit both of them: “Ich bin dreifach heimat-los: als Böhme in Österreich, als Österreicher unter Deutschen und als Jude überall”4.

Cixous ended her study of literature in 1968 with a dissertation on the Irish author James Joyce, a figure for whom ‘exile’ was also a life topic5. In 1969 her first novel was published, Dedans [Inside]. In 1974, she founded the Center for Feminine Studies at the University of Vincennes (today Paris 8); it was the first institute of its kind in Europe. In the following year, she first formulated her literary theory of écriture féminine.