Music, Politics, and Violence

Afterword: From Voice to Violence and Back Again

243 afterword From Voice to Violence and Back Again j. martin daughtry They warn us that there may be inspirations from below, as well as from above.—The Duke of Argyll 1. We begin with breath, the life-sustaining act: Inhale slowly. Exhale slowly. Repeat. Inhalation introduces fresh energy into the organism; it marks the body’s submission to the cyclical microrhythms of life (i.e., it is the upbeat to exhalation ’s downbeat); and it represents an accumulation and crystallization of potential. Potential what? Potential everything: with inhalation, anticipation builds, anything is possible, action is imminent. She took a deep breath, and then she—laughed, sobbed, jumped, took flight, pulled the trigger, burst into song—whatever she did, she acted. Inhalation precedes a multitude of acts, one of which is simply more breathing. Even if this is all that follows, more breathing equals life, which makes inhalation the emphatic (if temporary) deferral of the void. She took a deep breath, and then she— Inhale slowly. Exhale slowly. Repeat. 2. The metaphysical significance of breath has been the object of formal reflection for at least twenty-five centuries. From the Confucian qi (“breath,” music, politics, and violence / 244 “life-force”) to the Sanskrit prana (“breath,” “vital energy”) to the works of Anaximenes of Miletus, the pre-Socratic thinker who regarded air as the fundamental substance from which all things earthly and divine are fashioned, breath and breathing have regularly been placed in a tight relation with the flow of spiritual energy and psychic rejuvenation. In the English language, for nearly five hundred years, the term “inspiration” has connected the drawing in of breath with the drawing in of spiritual enlightenment. Adriana Cavarero, musing on fellow philosopher Emmanuel Levinas’s preoccupation with the breath, contends that, for Levinas, breath . . . introduces the theme of the soul that, like ruah [Hebrew: “breath,” “holy spirit”], belongs to the semantic family of respiration: in Latin, anima, in Greek anemos; or else, psyche from the verb psycho, “to breathe”; or even pneuma [ancient Greek: “spirit,” “wind,” “breath”] itself.1 In Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence, Levinas draws upon the concepts of psyche and pneuma to position breathing as one of the foundations of ethical relations. To breathe in the breath of one’s interlocutor, of one’s other, is to take that person into oneself, to open oneself into a relation of hospitality. In his words, “breathing is transcendence in the form of opening up.”2 Silvia Benso describes Levinasian breathing as “a deep inspiration—an inspiring, breathing the other in as well as a being inspired, animated by the other.”3 The moment of inspiration, for Levinas, is a signal moment of being-in-the-world, with others, ethically. Beginning with the ancients from regions throughout the world and stretching, with remarkable continuity, into the modern era, inspiration has been placed within an ethical matrix that privileges unmediated communication (with the other, with the environment, with the divine); positive energy (corporeal and spiritual); and peace and serenity. To breathe in, in this sense, is to be born anew. But we can’t sustain inspiration indefinitely: at some point, we must exhale. And exhaling, equally broadly, has been read across the centuries as a metonym for death. (It’s not an accident that we call both “expiration” in English.) The respiratory cycle can thus be read as a microcosm of the life cycle, which begins with our first inhalation and ends when we “give up the ghost” with our dying breath. I want to stake out this spot, the pivotal instant that separates inspiration and expiration, as a rich metaphorical starting place for a few closing thoughts about the relationship of music to violence. Actually, my chosen topic overlaps with music, but also stands apart from it: what I really want to talk about is voice, and the ways that voices—both within and outside musical contexts—resonate within the field of the social, which, as it happens , is the field in which violence also takes place. The instant following Afterword / 245 inspiration and preceding expiration is an ideal moment to consider this topic, for at this moment of held breath, we haven’t yet acted, and so can pause and reflect upon everything that we might do or not do with that breath, everything that we’ve done before and can repeat or not repeat, every utterance, every...