ABSTRACT
The British government offered the people of the north-east a regional assembly with a rather small amount of autonomy. Newcastle University is also the lead partner in a regional consortium whose music programmes have been awarded the status of Centre of Excellence in Teaching and Learning. This chapter argues that Newcastle exposes so richly that complexity, as it affects the processes of musical production, dissemination and consumption. It is important for the subject musical or cultural no less than individual that mechanisms of distinction and identification, including relationships with a Master-Signifier continue to subsist; otherwise the result may be psychosis. The issue is whether negativity is to be regarded as merely intermediary, a movement between two normalities, or as radical refusal. It is noteworthy that Slavoj Zizek also translates this system into the form of a Greimasian semiotic square. The Hysteric, then, refuses official interpellations, centring her desire around a symptomatology which reveals her alienation.
