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s t a n c e 54 / c h a p t e r t h r e e Stance and Others, Stance and Lives 7 Examining the basic dynamics of stance, the previous chapter revealed some specific ways in which stance is tied to its social context. For example , the act character of stance, the emergence of facet stances, metastances , and total stance, and the movement of meaning and valence among differing modalities and locations in lived time are all social inasmuch as they all are constituted through social practice (in the sense of that term elaborated in practice theory): that is, they are actively accomplished by the agent and at the same time fundamentally shaped by the agent’s culture and history. I will discuss ideas from practice theory more fully in the next chapter, but for now I will observe that experience is not social only because past interactions shape present behavior; it is also social because it unfolds in the lived give-and-take between the experiences of differing actors in face-to-face or more highly mediated interactions. The music theory class and piano recital examples alluded to these social dimensions of stance, and this chapter explores this topic systematically. I begin by examining the relationship between stance and its expression and the ways in which stance is partially shared across the experiences of individual actors. From there, I will explore the phenomenon of stance on the other and suggest how stance ties immediate situations to the largest temporal scales of a person’s life. Stance and Its Expression As we have seen, an audience’s interpretation of a performer’s stance has a large impact on the meaning that the audience finds in the performance . But how might I come to experience your stance? In considering this issue, it is easy to confuse stance with the media that we interpret as a reflection of it. Making that distinction clear is the first step to seeing the Stance and Others, Stance and Lives 55 / complex relationships among stance, the body, and media. This in turn will lay the groundwork for understanding how the possibility of an inprinciple awareness of media as an expression of stance can enable the partial sharing of meaning between people. From this abstract discussion, we will be able to examine the particulars of how specific stance qualities are shared in expressive culture. To get our first fix on the question, we return again to our hypothetical conservatory. What, exactly, does it mean to describe a stance—to say, for example, that our pianist’s dynamics are “sensitive” or that the way that she fingers a chord is “awkward and uncertain”? While descriptions such as these can be contested or misunderstood, within the confines of particular social worlds it is often the case that such descriptions are unproblematically understood and agreed upon among a group of actors. In this situation , the term “sensitivity” refers to fine-grained and varied changes in tempo and dynamics that make sense with respect to the formal structures of the preexisting composition. The ease with which such terminology communicates its meaning within a social group obscures the complexity involved in judging a musician’s playing as sensitive. Certainly, when a performer in the Western art tradition has a sensitive stance, the amplitude of the sound waves varies in a way that that description explains. However, the first point to see here is that there is nothing inherently sensitive in the physical sound waves that would be captured by a microphone at our May student concert. Sensitivity is a function of the intentional subject engaged with an instrument and the sound produced by it. In the noetic sub-mode of Western conservatory recital performance, sensitivity requires a musician enculturated to know what counts as a composition and how that composition works, a moving body that can enact the composition with dynamics relative to that shape, and a hearing body that monitors that ongoing action. In the noetic sub-mode of recital listening, hearing the performer’s sensitivity requires a listener with an auditory apparatus relative to which the dynamics are “fine-grained” and a familiarity with the tradition such that she can, in intentional engagement, distinguish the composition from the performance and make sense of the relationship between them. Thus, while stance qualities of performers may be partially understood by audiences, and while research can uncover how particular media in particular social worlds embody...

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