If you want to know whether something or someone possesses a capacity for self-recognition or self-perception, a common test to use is the mirror test. Put people in front of a mirror, and see if they can recognize themselves in their reflections. Can you tell that your reflection is your image, that is, an image of you yourself? If so, you would see that the reflection of your nose is not another’s nose. Rather, you would recognize that it refers back to your actual nose. If you wanted to touch your nose, you wouldn’t touch the mirror. You would touch your face. That implies that you can recognize yourself, hence the official name of this test: mirror self-recognition (MSR). That test has some problems. Ultimately, the mirror test says very little about the self of those who do or don’t recognize themselves in the mirror. It says more about the self of someone who thinks mirrors are adequate tests for selfhood.
Continue readingTag: sense
Five Theses for Emancipatory Music
1.
Music is the art of the hope for resonance: a sense that does not make sense except because of its resounding in itself.
Jean-Luc Nancy, Listening (Fordham UP, 2007), p. 67
2.
No music has the slightest esthetic worth if it is not socially true, if only as a negation of untruth; no social content of music is valid without an esthetic objectification.
Theodor Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music (Seabury Press, 1976), p. 197.
3.
Percussion music is revolution. Sound and rhythm have too long been submissive to the restrictions of nineteenth-century music. Today we are fighting for their emancipation. Tomorrow, with electronic music in our ears, we will hear freedom.
John Cage, Silence (Wesleyan University Press, 1961), p. 87.
4.
In music the hegemony of the 2/4 & 4/4 beat must be overthrown. We need a new music, totally insane but life-affirming, rhythmically subtle yet powerful, & we need it now.
Hakim Bey, “Post-Anarchism Anarchy” (AOA Plenary Session, 1987).
5.
You really should be able to feel the higher power of music and be moved by it, rather than listening to me waffle on and having to explain it.
Maynard James Keenan, quoted in Steve Morse, “Sonic Evolution With the Use of Tool,” Boston Globe (11.15.96), p. D14.
