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The Social Life of Stance 97 / c h a p t e r f o u r The Social Life of Stance and the Politics of Expressive Culture 7 We encounter an incredible variety of things in our lives: physical objects, texts, rules, moods, our own bodies, other people. The diversity is vast and it can seem overwhelming. The foundational insight of Husserl’s phenomenology is that no matter how varied are the things that we encounter, we can find a common structure in all of our experiences. That structure is intentionality , a subject engaging an object, not merely passively registering that object but actively constituting it in experience. Stance is the quality with which those engagements take place. While the forms of stance are as diverse as the things that we engage—stance on a musical composition or stance on the practice of reception, stance on the rules or moves of a game, stance on another person, stance on one’s own life in its long time-scale— all of these types of stance are fundamentally united by that intentional structure. Whether we consider a writer handling characters in a sensitive or callous manner, a music fan listening to a CD with an open or closed mind, a stand-up comic addressing an audience gently or in a combative fashion, or a graduate student in music viewing a lifetime in the practice room as an appealing future or a jail sentence, we see the common fact of a person grappling with the things of her world and bringing them into her experience. The quality of that grappling plays a key role in the overall meaning of things for her. Throughout this discussion, I have understood the constitution of experience as a kind of social practice, in the sense of that term elaborated in the classical formulations of practice theory—a kind of process that is both actively achieved by the person and profoundly informed by situated and large-scale social contexts (see, e.g., Giddens [1976] 1993, 1979, 1984; Bourdieu 1977).1 The social dimensions of such constitutive practices have run s t a n c e 98 / through every element of my discussion. From an audience member who listens uncomfortably to works from a tradition that she cannot call her own, to the jazz musicians who grapple competitively with each other on the stand, to the guitar student who struggles to come to terms with a future shaped by the power relations of the Western conservatory—all of the types of stance that I have discussed emerge within and are shaped by a larger social world. The relationships between stance and that larger world are complex, and to introduce a systematic examination of this topic, I want to use ideas from practice theory to re-read one of the basic concepts in contemporary scholarship—context. From Alan Dundes ([1964] 1980) and Dan Ben-Amos ([1971] 2000) to Alan Merriam (1964) and John Blacking ([1967] 1995), context was one of the fundamental keywords in the folklore and ethnomusicology of the 1960s and 1970s. Scholars placed texts “in context” and sought to understand the relationship between what seemed to be disparate kinds of objects of study: texts (such as pieces of music, material artifacts, or narratives ) and contexts (cultures, histories, and societies). In the very best work of the period, scholars drew connections between the meanings of texts and the lives of the people who make them. Too often, though, the texts of expressive culture were seen to be “in context” in the same way that a cow is in a corral or a car in a garage—as a well-bounded thing enclosed by a container . But texts and contexts are not two different types of study objects, two different orders of reality; they are made of the same “stuff ”—social practices. Clearly, we cannot deny that texts often have an objectlike quality and at least a partial autonomy from any given person who produces or receives them. No creative act of reception can find a B-major 7 chord in Bob Dylan’s original recording of “All Along the Watchtower,” nor can a reader of the Grimms’ version of “Cinderella” claim to find a scene in which Jack steals an iPod. Yet, for expressive culture to have any significance at all, it must be brought into lived experience, and that process deposits a layer of practice in the text that is fundamental to its meaning. The first...

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