Recall Schopenhauer’s account of the encounter with the artwork, which allows one to break from the world of representation to seize upon underlying Ideas (conceived Platonically). Art presents us with objects in terms of what manifests itself in them without the mediation of concepts. Ideas present themselves sensuously; they reach us when we encounter the object in a disinterested manner. But they reach us such that, in disinterested contemplation, we no longer exist as individuals with individual wills. Instead, each of us mirrors the object we encounter; we exist, in Schopenhauer’s terms, as a pure subject who is as it were merged with the contemplation of the object. This purity is such that it is without will, pain or, indeed, time. Yet it is this supra-personal subject who is capable of knowing the Ideas; the relation to the work is cognitive; there is an aesthetic knowing.
What, then, when the encounter with the work is to be understood non-cognitively – when it is not contemplation through which one would merge with the work, but when, nevertheless, there is a certain purification of the subject. Purification? A despecification, when you encounter the work not, once again, as a detached ‘I with a personal will, but as the impersonal ‘it’ – the ‘il’ without attributes whom the work reaches because it bypasses every attribute. The ‘il’? Could I write here, less obscurely, of the body? Yes, so long as this suggests the non-cognitive locus of an affect, the open space into which the song is received (I am thinking of the music of (Smog), Will Oldham, Cat Power). And as long as the affect is no longer bound to Ideas nor to knowledge, but their inverse: the matter that is without form, the unruly element which escapes Idea and representation. And then, finally, there is no mirroring here, unless there is a mirror that allows you to see not you but the darkness of your body as it joins the body of a reserve without form, without Idea.
But then remember the condition of music for Schopenhauer: it does not represent an Idea but presents the transpersonal cosmic Will itself, in all its gradations. Thus, the material part of the Will is analogous to the ground bass, organic nature in harmony and subjectivity, spirit and feeling in melody. Now think of the affect of a song like, say, ‘Little Girl Shoes’ by (Smog): it would be towards the ground bass that the work tends, the throbbing or pulsing that is the undoing of the ‘higher’ forms (harmony, melody) – or perhaps the background against which the ‘higher’ forms unfold. Better still, perhaps: the song emerges in the struggle of the ‘higher’ forms against the lower – such that, with some music, matter, unruly matter is as it there, rumbling even as the voice, the guitar seems to have left it behind. Then the ground bass is the rumbling within music: the barely musical drone in which harmony, melody threaten to disappear.
The Will: is this the right word? But it presses nowhere and it cannot be unified. Think of it instead as the outside, scattered in uncountable multiplicity, of the arrhythmia which has not yet gathered itself into a pattern. And the ground bass? It is the rumbling of that place in which the world tears itself apart.
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