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Structures of Stance in Lived Experience 27 / c h a p t e r t w o Structures of Stance in Lived Experience 7 At first glance, applying the notion of stance to particular research situations might seem to be a straightforward proposition. To attend to stance would be to attend to the styles with which composers compose, arrangers arrange, listeners listen, painters paint, and viewers view. However, unforeseen complexity arises from the fact that the production of expressive culture is not merely the creation of physical objects, and reception is not merely registering preexisting forms and bestowing meaning upon them. To the contrary, the production of expressive forms always involves a constituting of those forms in experience, and reception is always an active grappling that influences, not just the experienced meaning of those forms, but the audience’s perception of their very shape.1 As a result, understanding stance requires additional theoretical work. We need to explore the differing forms that stance can take, the ways in which stance interacts with other dimensions of experience, and the question of stance and time. These issues are the focus of this chapter. Fundamental Dynamics of Stance When we think of interpretation, the paradigm case we use is often one of judgment or decision. A prosecutor presents her evidence to a jury, and the twelve citizens sit in a room, think about the facts, discuss them, and, in a self-conscious act of judging, render a verdict. A similar model may seem to fit our most naive understanding of language learning. There is certainly no inherent relationship between the sounds “c-a-t” and the furry creature that sits on my lap at the end of the afternoon, and in our everyday theorizing we suppose that a child learns the meaning of “cat” by associating those s t a n c e 28 / sounds with the species Felis domesticus. Here, processes of thinking and judging are seen to attach meanings to things as a hat is attached to a head. Of course, such processes do take place in experience and are part of the overall interpretive dynamics of expressive culture; they are, however, only one part of that dynamic, and there are situations in which they do not occur at all. I will refer to any situation in which a meaning is bestowed through an active, self-conscious process as one of active valuation. Active valuation can certainly play a role in experiences of expressive culture , but it is very different from stance, and understanding the relationship between the two is important. As the valual component of the pre-reflexive (though not pre-conscious or unconscious) constitution of lived experience, stance is a necessary part of all experience, while active valuation is optional. For example, the luxuriant pleasure (or moderate enjoyment or crushing tedium ) of releasing oneself into the flow of downtempo electronic dance music can be accompanied by distanced acts of critically judging the choice of samples and use of sequencers. But such active valuation need not occur for the music to be meaningful, and it is the manner of engaging with the track in acts of listening and bodily movement that is the source of much of its meaning. When we conflate meaning making with active valuation, we sometimes assume that all situations without active valuation are meaningless and thus turn a blind eye to the rich continuum of meaning that exists in all of our experiences. Such a flawed perspective spawns an equally flawed opposite, a romantic reaction against the scholarly study of expressive culture and ardent claims for the ineffability of “spirit” or “soul” in music or other forms of artistic behavior. The notion of stance can serve as a corrective here by drawing our attention to the chronic nature of value and meaning making in every domain of experience, not just those instances where we bestow meaning through an active and self-conscious process. The types of qualities invested in stance are as diverse as the forms of meaning in experience. It would be impossible to construct a typology here, but we can suggest landmarks in this territory and perhaps sketch at least one possible way of mapping it. For example, one nearly universal quality of stance is facility , the ease or difficulty with which a practice is carried out. In his landmark study Verbal Art as Performance, Richard Bauman placed facility of production at the center of his definition of performance...

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