Date of Award
2012
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelors
Department
Humanities
First Advisor
Miles, Stephen
Keywords
Irigaray, Luce
Area of Concentration
Humanities
Abstract
In this creative project, I produced seven sonic compositions interpreting and strategizing my work with some key aspects of Luce Irigaray's political thought on Woman. Irigaray's thought on Woman has a strong political and ethical prerogative which is important for a provisionally embodied search for a women's place in politics and language. I rematerialized Irigaray's thought on speaking (as) Woman, mimicry, and disjunctive becoming, as a way of thinking about performing, listening to, and creating music. Irigaray notes that speaking (as) woman is "to loose the signifier from the signified, to escape the fixity of representation by an ever-changing signification." Speaking (as) woman, is vital for feminine becoming, which is a desirous mode of becoming, not indexed upon the past memory dominated by phallocentric self-referentiality. I have called my sonic process of interaction with Ableton Live, a digital audio workstation, "morphing gesture", which entailed a process of mutual determination between me and something else. The Ableton environment allowed me to interact with the software to produce surprising or accidental results--sounds, themes, or musical phrases which were less transcriptions of preformed musical thoughts, and more a processual interlocking of multiple gestures, adjustments, themes, and chance. I incorporate public rhetoric and speaking in my musical compositions, as a form of examining what is included in the political. Part of my project was to attempt to unravel the meaning of these political speeches by manipulating and excerpting parts of them to produce speech clips which were non-universalizing, and instead articulated something like Irigaray's theoretical gesture to horizontally re-enflesh men and women in locations alternative to phallogocentrism. I have tried to explore the contiguities between music, speech, and living beings---that which is intimately significant, meaningful, and potentializing. To compose was to processually materialize the "sensible" with the symbolic in the fluid medium of music. Insofar as the tone signifies presence, I wanted to reimagine language so that I could signify those speaking bodies in absentia via a disjunctive and arranged actualization in music. The interval which takes centerstage in my thesis is the mediation of the I/you relation through new language thought within the aspirational horizon of sexual difference. This marks the ethical relation between two as a political gesture in taking up sexual difference as a condition of possibility for a feminine imaginary, a political future which does not yet exist.
Recommended Citation
Kim, Joohyun, "Embodied Gesture, Luce Irigaray and Woman's Political Imaginary in Digital Music Production Seven Compositions and Feminist Inquiry" (2012). Theses & ETDs. 4618.
https://digitalcommons.ncf.edu/theses_etds/4618
Rights
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