Politics and production of subjectivities: music and literature

Abstract

The article debates the contemporary conditions of the relationship between politics and the production of subjectivity in music and literature, from two precise angles: 1) the differences between the types of aesthetic experience that the two arts stimulate; 2) the actualization of these experiences in the current condition of art’s social dissemination. From the contribution of authors from the Literary Studies (Zumthor, Iser, Gumbrecht) and philosophy (Deleuze, Guattari, Lipovetski), among other fields, the article discusses the contrast between the sensoriality of music and literature’s call for interpretation, from which it derives 1) the reasons for the differences the social disseminations of one and the other, 2) the differences between music and literature as stances of production of subjectivity. In this last item music is described as a force that subjectifies the individual by “dragging” him to a different position regardless of his conscious control, whereas literature provides the experience of alternative realities to those of everyday life. By affirming the legitimacy of these two processes of subjectification, the sensorial aesthetic experience is rescued from the moral critique to which it was historically submitted, as it acquires (together with the interpretive kinds of aesthetic experience) a politically productive domain within the current (democratic) conditions of information exchange. As a general goal – based on typological comparisons between the two arts – the article tries to establish a descriptive analytical framework for the observation of their presences and relative positions in contemporary society.