In his Adoptions—a response to my response to his response to Phil Ford’s ‘Where is the self that performs?’—Douglas Boyce gets at the core of the problem of the work-concept when he writes: ‘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.’ The force of the work-concept, and in turn its danger, lies in its very claim to universality—its ability to cloak itself in necessity thus masking its ‘constructedness’ and contingency. We hear all music through the earbuds of the work-concept.Douglas questions the notion of ‘moving beyond’ the work-concept and the self-concept and fears that an attempt at ‘transcending’ what emerges out of complex social and cultural contexts runs the risk of hubris or narcissism. Indeed, Lydia Goehr, in her Imaginary Museum of Musical Works, concurs when she writes that, ‘It is difficult to challenge a practice in a radical way that one at the same time participates in.’ (p. 261). These comments point to a central issue of theoretical and practical concern, i.e. our normative stance in relation to the work-concept. Should the work-concept be challenged? Is it a question of working within the work-concept and challenging the manifestations of cultural imperialism that it engenders? Cleansing the work-concept of its ideological dirt? Or, is this ideological dirt the work-concept’s obscene supplement?
Douglas hesitates to think in terms of ‘moving beyond’ the work concept because, as a composer, he is still in the process of adopting it. Lydia Goehr captures this when she writes, ‘When musicians want to challenge a concept, they first have to acknowledge that the present meaning of the work-concept is as it is.’ (p. 255). The first step is an analytical or critical one: we must first understand the work-concept, its history, its ramifications. Douglas cannot ‘move beyond’ without first understanding fully the concept.
The task of ‘world-building’, to which Douglas refers, demands a primordial relationship to one’s past. Douglas suggests that the task at hand is a bridging of the past to the possibility of a future. His interpretation of this ‘moving beyond’ as ‘transcendence’ and his hesitation faced with his rootedness in social, cultural, aesthetic contexts—contexts regulated by the work-concept—suggest that the movement beyond the work-concept is a radical break, a severing from this rootedness. An act of negation, of violence. Isn’t this something of a re-enactment of the debates surrounding the avant-garde’s relationship to tradition? A transformation from within? Or a rejection from without? But does this ‘moving beyond’ necessarily constitute a radical break? Adoption? Or Abortion?
Can we not think of this ‘moving beyond’ as a demand? A challenge with ethical implications? Certainly any alteration or dismantling of the work-concept is ‘no less complicated a process than its emergence.’ (Goehr p. 260) Can we not also think of ‘moving beyond’ as something of a hermeneutical and critical process? This is to suggest that questioning and attempting to deconstruct the work-concept generate the very possibility of ‘moving-beyond’ and of creating new contexts and relations.
Are we to move beyond the work-concept? What are the ramifications of doing so? And, perhaps more importantly, what are the implications of not attempting to ‘move beyond’ or critically undermine those concepts that regulate our lives?
I hesitate to conceptualize the demand to ‘move-beyond’ the work-concept as a negation. Perhaps, we can see this ‘moving beyond’ less as a radical break and more as, along with Wittgenstein, living in such a way that what is problematic disappears. In Culture and Value, Wittgenstein writes:
Getting hold of the difficulty deep down is what is hard. Because if it is grasped near the surface it simply remains the difficulty it was. It has to be pulled out by the roots; and that involves our beginning to think about these things in a new way. The change is as decisive as, for example, that from alchemical to the chemical way of thinking. The new way of thinking is what is so hard to establish. Once the new way of thinking has been established, the old problems vanish; indeed they become hard to recapture. For they go with our way of expressing ourselves and, if we clothe ourselves in a new form of expression, the old problems are discarded along with the old garment.