ABSTRACT
The attempt to dislodge music from the culturally privileged domain accorded it through its social emancipation drives the converging forces of both narrative deconstructions and social Werktreue toward a critical precipice. In the aftermath of Kant’s subjectivization of aesthetics and the ensuing sense of autonomy that was won for music and art, the impasse that sprang from attributing music’s creative vehemence to the aesthetic’s conscious designation (as distinctly different from practical activities) returned with a vengeance. Shifting the topos of music’s imitative function onto the social plane repeats, as it were, music’s metaphysical elevation by reversing music’s designated locus of meaning. Aligning music’s mimetic function with the Werktreue principle’s social transposition only reinscribes the distinction that justifies constricting the aesthetic to a dissembling role. Consequently, the impossibility of attributing music’s productive significance to conditions more receptive to music’s complicity with hegemonic social and political agendas reasserts itself just at the point where this transposition seems to leave the difficulty in question behind.
