Bsp Podcast

Rachel Elliott - ‘The Futurity of the “We”: A Merleau-Pontian Account of Group Temporality and Improvised Music’

Informações:

Synopsis

This episode of Season 5 of the BSP Podcast features Rachel Elliott, assistant professor of Philosophy at Brandon University. The presentation is taken from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ Online.   ABSTRACT: Is sharing time what underpins the experience of belonging to a higher-order unity or group? In this paper, I consider the extent to which music produces collective belonging using Alfred Schütz’s idea of a tuning-in relationship among participants in a musical event. I claim that Schütz’s Husserlian account of that relationship relies too much on the idea of active synthesis, whereas the notion can be better articulated using Merleau-Ponty's conception of time as transition synthesis, derived from his idea of the habit body. This Merleau-Pontian version of the tuning-in relationship, however, foregrounds questions about musical genre, particularly in the distinction between improvised and non-improvised musics, in constituting the tuning-in relationship characteristic of what Schüt