Abstract
Music provides a provocative landscape to consider a posthuman ontology of immanence for interpretive research. Since it is not an object per se, it challenges taken-for-granted beliefs about sense-making. This chapter reworks ontology as untology to reaffirm the aesthetics of hermeneutic understanding as a being always becoming anew as it differentiates itself from the flow of existence as sensible, and thus, as also inescapably implicated in world-making. The movement of understanding reverberates through unsettled meanings of sense, language, and being, opening up spaces for improvisations that disrupt their taken-for-granted definitions. Gadamer’s affinity for listening undermarks this hermeneutic process of re-composition. Since rhythms are immanent to linguisticality’s being and to world-making, interpreters are called upon to become compositional partners who attune their bodies to the polyphonic universe in which they find themselves immersed. The chapter concludes by suggesting a poetics of dissensus as a way to heed the ethical implications of rethinking interpretive inquiry as understanding’s improvisational attunements.
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Notes
- 1.
Researching and living are both interpretive practices so there is no hidden meaning behind my uses of researcher or interpreter; both denote an interpreting being.
- 2.
As will become clear later, the very idea that entities might not pre-exist the research act or assemblage is an oxymoron that is provocative of ontologically oriented research.
- 3.
- 4.
At least not a Being that is potentially intelligible to humans.
- 5.
The full quote states that “being outside oneself is the positive possibility of being wholly with something else” is “being present.” I removed the beginning statement not because I do not believe there is no separation between our bodies and the object encountered, but to avoid adding concepts such as inside and outside to an already dense argument.
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Freeman, M. (2024). Music’s Aesthetic Untology: Understanding’s InMaterial Improvisations. In: McAuliffe, S. (eds) Gadamer, Music, and Philosophical Hermeneutics. Contributions to Hermeneutics, vol 12. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41570-8_15
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