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Chris asks some wonderful questions, which I will respond to bit by bit in future posts; for now, just a quick thought on possible trajectories for these discussions.
I wonder if 'moving beyond' really is the right language for what I'm interested in– the self and the work-concept are surely regulative forces, but as such they emerge from social and cultural context forces, and so are note something the one 'transcends.' Chris mentions Butler, and I immediately jump to her articulation of the notion of interdependence not as a force, but as the fabric that allows us to be ourselves, as we under 'being ourselves.'
The reason for my interest in thinking about and around the work-concept (and the self-concept) is that in mistaking them as universal or fundamental principles ,our expectations of how they operate in the world (and thus how the world is) are put off kilter. They are constructed and conditional (though useful) notions, concepts that have shaped so much of what I understand music to be that for me to think about 'transcending them' runs the risk of hubris or narcissism, but most likely despair. (In this moment, I am thinking of Zizek's hilarious discussion of rediscovering his own ideological blind spots during his first encounter with an American toilet.) Even if it were possible, to transcend them might alter everything that makes me want to be a composer in the first place. Certainly, it's a valid artistic stance to shoot for that kind of total defenestration, but I am constitutionally inclined to always check that bathwater for babies.
In Caleb's response to my post, he says that my argument pushes 'choice' to the background, which I think is actually the opposite of what I'm after - by connecting individual choice to the adoption of technics, it lends those choices even more significance. Caleb's 'compositional choices' that he thinks of expressive acts for which he must take responsibility are in my schema acts of adoption in which I build a self and a world for that self to operate in. This world building is not phantasmagoric or delusional or narcissistic, but rather a bridging of the past with its ghosts and memories with the future and its possibilities.
So I hesitate to even try to 'move beyond' the work-concept and the self-concept precisely because I do not understand it, because I am still in the process of adopting it:
Yet that which is their own often remains foreign to human beings for a long time, because they abandon it without having appropriated it. And human beings abandon what is their own because it is what most threatens to overwhelm them.
Heidegger, Hölderlin's Hymn 'The Ister'