In Sounds and Silences: Acknowledging Political Engagement

This symposium grapples with such questions as "Should music educators participate in political understandings?" The term "politics" often brings to mind "Big P" political matters, including citizenship, governance of the state, the election of officials, and the formation of public policy. Another way of thinking about politics is to associate it with power relations in social interactions of any kind. If one thinks about it in the second way, then wherever there are two or more people, there are politics. Questions such as "Should we participate in politics?" and "How engaged should we be?" become meaningless. Michel Foucault's discussions of the pastoral forms of governance employed by the modern state, specifically the uses of technologies of the self, challenged long-held views about relationships between the individual and the state. In particular, his claim that major dominations are the effects, not the causes, of myriad local and particular mobilizations of power provides a rationale for examining these local mobilizations.¹ If major dominations and "Big P" politics are the effects of local mobilizations, then everyone participating in social interactions participates in "Big P" politics, as well.

This more global conception of political engagement stands in sharp contrast to a narrower one, which can be described using a "swimmer-on the-shore" metaphor. The swimmer stands on a beach looking out at the sea and decides whether this is a day for a toe dip, wading to the knees, total immersion, or staying out of the water altogether. The swimmer can choose to stay dry (unless inundated by the tide or a tidal wave). This conception is evident in a comment reportedly made by a music education professor in response to two back-to-back annual meetings of the music education researchers at Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) institutions. Both meetings had been devoted to critique of MENC's policies and practices, and the disgruntled professor reportedly remarked, "That's enough about politics; let's get back to talking about music." In his view, which is shaped by the "swimmer" conception, some discussions are political, others are not; while some curricular areas, such as civics and sex education, are political, music is not, nor should it be. If, however, we assume that there is power in all social relations, then the "swimmer" conception has no salience because everyone is immersed; music, because it is a social activity, is political. Its engagement in politics is neither good nor bad, in and of itself; rather, it is inevitable.

Some may concede that although it is not possible to be disengaged, it is necessary and good for scholars and teachers to be politically "neutral." Conceptions of neutrality rely on a one-dimensional linear integers model of political engagement. On the line representing the integers, there is a plus side, a minus side, and zero, the zero presumably being the point of neutrality. People and views associated with the far ends of the line are extreme, while those closer to the zero point are moderate. In addition, positions on the line are assigned a moral value; depending upon the issue and the perspective from which the line is being viewed, plus can be good but minus is bad, plus can be bad but minus is good, neutral can be good, or neutral can be bad. If every issue and every social relation is political, however, and if we assume that people and relationships change, then the linear integers model is inadequate because it fails to embody the dynamic, multi-dimensional character of the complex social relations in which all of us engage. Another problem with the linear integers model is that it fails to interrogate the power vested in whomever or whatever decides what will constitute extreme, moderate, or neutral—what will be deemed reasonable and what outrageous. Sometimes this responsibility has been assigned to a fictitious "reasonable" person without much thought having been given to the political dimensions of the construction of reasoning. What is deemed outrageous in one system of reasoning may be perfectly reasonable in another.

Belief that education can and should be objective and neutral comes from...