A Deleuzian reimagining of Susanne Langer's philosophy: becoming-feeling in music education

ABSTRACT

While Langer's assertions about feeling and art have had a marked impact on music educators’ thinking and action, they have also earned substantial critique. The purpose of this philosophical inquiry is to examine Langer's and Deleuze's writings about the ontology of art and to posit a new concept, ‘becoming feeling,’ inspired by the meeting of their philosophies. Deleuze's assertions about forces, intensities, and becomings avoid the pitfalls of Langer's statements about music's symbolic nature, but his focus on ‘nonhuman becomings’ has the potential to neglect the emotional aspects of humanity that Langer finds central to musical experiences. I offer that artistic experiences foster ‘becoming-feeling,’ which involves sensing the world as though one were specific, continually-changing feelings. Examples of how musically educative experiences centred on ‘becoming-feeling’ might lead to more refined and ordered understandings as well as to more complex and confused ones are offered.

KEYWORDS:

• Langer
• Deleuze
• feeling
• becoming
• music education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributor

Lauren Kapalka Richerme is assistant professor of music education at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music. Her research interests include philosophy and education policy.

Notes

1 Campbell, Connell, and Beegle (2007) write specifically about ‘emotions’ rather than feelings. While related, a distinction between the two is articulated in the ‘A proposal for becoming-feeling’ section of this paper.

2 Both Langer and Deleuze write primarily about ‘art’ in terms of specific ‘artworks,’ thus reifying ‘art’ and endowing specific ‘artworks’ with stable identities. Such thinking is problematic because it does not fully attend to art as a process and it neglects how one's engagement with an ‘artwork’ can evolve over time.

3 Langer (1953) directly contrasts art with philosophy, writing, ‘Art is neither philosophy nor a substitute for philosophy, but is itself an epistemological datum about which we can philosophize’ (118). Similarly, Deleuze and Guattari ([1991]1994) distinguish between philosophy, science, and art, arguing that they ‘think’ through concepts, functions, and sensations, respectively (198). The philosopher creates concepts in order to offer consistency, the scientist creates functions that give the world points of reference, and the artist composes sensations in order to ‘restore’ the infinite (197).

4 The problematic nature of this position is addressed in the ‘Limitations’ section of this essay.

5 It is important to note that Langer writes solely about Western classical music. It follows from her writing that while other forms of music making, such as popular music, may portray ideas of feeling unambiguously, they do not necessarily do so in ways that foster processes such as contemplation and understanding as Langer describes them.

6 What constitutes societal ‘advancement’ is a contentious topic about which Langer offers no further clarity.

7 I attend to ‘artistic experiences’ rather than ‘aesthetic experiences.’ The term ‘aesthetic’ implies a ‘critique of taste’ (Oxford English Dictionary 2000) and has historically functioned to relegate certain musical practices. While the term ‘artistic experiences’ subsumes ‘aesthetic experiences,’ by avoiding the propagation of a preordained artistic hierarchy, it resists the potentially problematic connotations of the latter.

8 Feelings and even emotions more broadly play only a minimal role in contemporary music education rhetoric. For example, the extensive 2014 National Core Music Standards make only two references to emotions, in standards MU:Pr5.1.7 and MU:Pr5.1.8, and one reference to ‘feelings’ in association with ideas and concepts (State Education Agency Directors of Arts Education 2014). Likewise, the advocacy portion of the National Association for Music Education's website (https://nafme.org/advocacy/ makes little mention of feelings or emotions.

9 In using this example, I am not arguing that technical considerations necessarily precede or inhibit becoming-feeling.