Can music be critical? 

In “Traditional and Critical Theory”, Horkheimer explicates these two theoretical approaches through their relative relations to knowledge. While traditional theory positions knowledge as an oppositional other, which the theorist can clarify, understand and know from a rational, observational distance, critical theory sees knowledge as a dialectical other, in which the observer is always implicated: through the critical lens, knowledge is never secure and certain because the conditions for knowledge change as the perspective of the knower changes. Criticality, therefore, is theory’s awareness of its own conditions: an epistemic ouroboros which cannot be settled. From this perspective, if music cannot proclaim knowledge, then it could never be critical. If I limit myself to this narrow line of enquiry, then the answer to my question will hinge around an investigation of musical epistemology. 

A brief history of knowledge 

A classical definition of knowledge comes from Plato’s Theaetetus: “true judgement with an account is knowledge, and the kind without an account falls outside the sphere of knowledge”. This is often taken as a precursor of what analytic philosophers call Justified True Belief theory (JTB) and it came to dominate epistemology until the modern era. The competing early-modern schools of rationalism and empiricism can be understood as offering opposed positions on how a belief can be justified and how it can be found to be true. The turning point, as with so much of importance in philosophy, comes with Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Kant’s contribution emerges from a critique of both rationalist and empiricist accounts of knowledge. The rationalist belief that things can only be known a priori (ie. through deduction and rational consideration rather than through experience of the world) falls down in the preponderance of equally convincing competing truth-claims based on a priori deductions, each disagreeing with the others; if no-one can agree on what is true, there can be no JTB. Meanwhile, the empiricist belief that things can only be known a posteriori (ie. through inductive reasoning based on experience of the world rather than rational deductions) is unable to attain certainty for its claims as it’s only able to reason from the shaky contingencies of things which have been observed to happen in the past, rather than the necessity of analytic deductions; without certain justifications, there is no JTB. Kant’s solution of the synthetic a priori, in which knowledge is attained through understanding by actualising a priori concepts in experience, shifts the focus away from justification of things already believed, and looks instead at the conditions which allow these beliefs to emerge in the first place. What this ultimately means for Kant is that reality in itself (the thing in itself) is unknowable: all that can be known are the conditioned phenomena of our understanding. This is the point at which Horkheimer’s critical theory begins: philosophers are now directly examining the knowledge that they are always already immersed in, rather than theorising as if from an abstract distance. Kant’s work is radicalised by Hegel, politicised by Marx and reoriented towards first-person experience by Husserl, creating a critical landscape which covers a wide range of approaches to knowledge. 

What about music? 

All of these words associated with knowledge: judgements, accounts, justifications, understanding, phenomena, theory. How could music contain any of these? Can truth be expressed in music? Can music be called into service to justify a claim? Can music simply be mapped analogously onto words in order to fulfil the same role as words, or would that flatten music out and miss some kind of extra-linguistic excess it elaborates? Do the musical aspects of spoken words (voice, rhythm, intonation) contribute to the verbal establishment of knowledge? If voice is inseparable from knowledge, then is knowledge possible without music? I don’t have answers to all of these questions, but I can say that if music and knowledge have an inseparable relationship, then the question should not be “can music express knowledge?”, but “how does knowledge disappear without music?”.  A critical music then would be a music which plays with that relationship to reveal, undermine and rewrite the supporting role that music plays in the field of knowledge. 

Music and words 

All music functions only in collaboration with words. The forms of collaboration which might immediately come to mind are things like lyrics, titles, programme notes, performance instructions, spoken communications between performers in rehearsals, Tempo markings, dynamics, conversations audience members have with each other about a piece, reviews, academic papers etc. In all of these instances, the precise function of the music may be slightly different: lyrics, for example, may be written before the music and shape the music as it’s being written, or they may be applied to music which has already been composed; words exchanged in a rehearsal are in service of the music, which is both something upon which the rehearsal is conditioned and also the intended product of the rehearsal; words exchanged after the piece (such as conversations between audience members and critical reviews) mark the passage of the piece-of-music (as appearance of unified object) into the mediatory processes of discourse which dissolves the imaginary surface of the work into signifiers. In this regard, insofar as music is something we can know, that knowledge is dependent upon language. But that’s not to say that language is all there is to a piece of music. For example, Gang of Four’s song Love Like Anthrax, from their 1979 album Entertainment!, layers two contrasting sets of lyrics on top of each other: one a somewhat conventional pop-song structure with verses and choruses, sung by Jon King, featuring lyrics which appraise love as something uncomfortable and unwanted—“Love’ll get you like a case of anthrax/ And that’s something I don’t want to catch”; and the other a spoken word critique, recited by Andy Gill, of the way in which love is often talked about in pop music—“These groups and singers think that/ They appeal to everyone by singing about love, because apparently/ Everyone has, or can, love”. The point at which the critique escapes the literary and becomes musical is the point at which these two distinct vocal lines (dis)harmonise with each other. They are not simply presented one after another; the two different texts occur simultaneously. The literary analogue could be Derrida’s Glas, which simultaneously presents two different texts (one a reading of Hegel and the other of Genet) side by side in two different columns, to the effect that the two texts may be read as interrelated with each other purely because of their placement. However, while the reader of Glas has the option to read each text separately, the listener of Love Like Anthrax may not ever hear the two vocal lines except at the same time: the usage of (dis)harmony—a musical function—forces the listener to consider the two lines simultaneously. This effect is compounded by the occasional coming-together of the two voices to say certain lines in unison. The implication is clear: the song tells us through musical composition that these two antagonistic discourses converge on the same point. 

2 [voices] become 1 [voice] [and nothing more] 

Have I demonstrated a possible answer to my starting question, or have I answered a reverse question? The function of the (dis)harmonious voices in Love Like Anthrax might not be music as critique at all—a more accurate summary may be critique as music. In the song, the critical voice is not an emergent property of the two voices coming musically together; there is a singular critical position which bifurcates into two separate vocal lines. The best textual evidence for this is in Andy Gill’s final spoken line, “I don’t think we’re saying there’s anything wrong with love/ I just don’t think that what goes on between two people should be/ Shrouded in mystery”. Note the interchange of singular and plural first-person pronouns in the line, “I don’t think we’re saying”—there is a confusion over who is delivering the message. The confusion disappears if we understand that there is only one message, but it is delivered by two neurotic, dissonant messengers. On the one hand, there is the hysterical Jon King, who has accepted a structure from the master signifier pop love song, and now suffers from a wide variety of physical ailments which articulate a desire which can’t be contained by this structure, thus interrogating the very basis for its master signifier. On the other hand, there is the obsessive Andy Gill, who insists in rational prose that “what goes on between two people should [not] be shrouded in mystery”, thus seeming to reject the structure of pop love song, but nevertheless offering nothing to actually demystify love—despite the surface opposition to pop love songs, the pop love song ends up being the only through which Andy Gill is able to understand love, a claim I make which is supported by the frequent irruptions of Jon King’s lyrics into Andy Gill’s speeches: a musical return of the repressed. What kind of message can split into these two positions? I’d suggest that the message is a critical one: “I am writing a love song, but a love song is not adequate to the feeling of love, and so my love song will perform its own inadequacy by bifurcating into two incompatible positions.” The musical (dis)harmony is a manifestation of a latent critique. As such, the song is a reverse of the Spice Girls’ conventional love song 2 become 1, a title which conveys exactly the kind of sexual fantasy Lacan takes aim at with his famous “the sexual relation does not exist”. Love Like Anthrax explodes the fantasy of sexual union through the pop love song by revealing the divergent voice which must be supressed for this fantasy to be sustained. I will end this blog post by suggesting that voice is the operative organ of desire in music, and that a critical music exposes this voice as an incoherent and unanswerable command. Clearly, a lot more work is required to develop this last point but, for now, Love Like Anthrax stands as a good example of exactly this process in action.