The devil, it is said, is in the details. I am inclined to believe it. How else to explain that great temptation of cultural scholarship: to define an era through a song, a subculture through a safety pin, without fully detailing the living moments and human experiences that connect the general to the specific? Clearly, the devil doesn’t want us to find him lurking there.
Harris Berger does not succumb to this temptation. His fine-grained mode of analysis is all about teasing out the bedeviling details, naming the unnamed moments in which text is realized as living consciousness. In 1999, Berger made an important contribution to ethnomusicology and popular music studies with his Metal, Rock, and Jazz. In this book, the graduate of Indiana University’s Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology fused three types of attentiveness for which the department is known—Ruth Stone’s temporal musical analysis and feedback interview methodology; Richard Bauman’s attention to genre, intertextuality, and performativity; and Cornelia Fales’ deep studies of timbre—to produce a rich phenomenological analysis of three Ohio music scenes. From 2004 to 2007, Berger served as president of the U.S. branch of the International Association of Popular Music Studies, visibly confirming the increased importance of detailed ethnography in a field that often centered on textual analysis. (Conversely, his current role as president of the Society for Ethnomusicology confirms popular music’s increased importance within that discipline, though JFRR readers perhaps know him best as former co-editor of the Journal of American Folklore.)
In his ambitious recent book, Stance: Ideas about Emotion, Style, and Meaning for the Study of Expressive Culture, Berger offers both an argument and a methodology for the detailed phenomenological analysis of expressive culture within all humanistic disciplines. Knowingly or not, Berger asserts, most cultural scholars operate at the level of textual interpretation, sifting through signs in context to find meaning. The problem, however, is that meaning does not inhere in texts, but rather in the experience of them. Drawing on the terminology and methods of phenomenologists such as Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Berger strives to show that the analysis of this experience is not only possible, but also necessary for a complete picture of cultural production, reception, and circulation.
In Berger’s view, experience is the connective thread that makes generalizable attributes such as “style” possible; losing that thread can lead to theoretical unraveling. In calm, unpretentious prose, Berger levels a critique at the ungrounded nature of so much stylistic analysis: while it is good at “draw[ing] our attention to the distinctive affective and valual quality of particular people and their creations,” it is usually based on “undertheorized ideas about the relationships among text, practice, and experience and may thus lead to all manner of confusion” (23). To speak of “funkiness,” for example, could be to refer to the quality of a recording, a mode of performance, an affective experience, or an underlying ethos reflected in the recording or performance mode. What Berger offers is a phenomenological method and vocabulary for sorting out the processes, relations, agents, affects, and objects involved in cultural experience of a style such as funk. Attending to these specifics, the scholar opens up a world of practice rather than obscuring these practices behind their associated labels.
The central term in Berger’s book, “stance,” focuses attention on the ways that individuals actively “grapple” with cultural objects such as a sentence in a novel, a tricky piano run on a jazz record, the weave of a hand-crafted rug, or an imagined scene from a film script yet unwritten. As these varied examples suggest, the “object” being grappled with can be physical or imaginary—past, present, or anticipated. Moreover, the person grappling with the object can be a cultural composer, performer, or consumer. Finally, the stances themselves—the kind of affective attention these different agents use to bring forth their experiences of the object—are mutually influential. As he does so often, Berger provides a musical example:
“the [student] composer emerges from a social context and orients her compositional process to the anticipated probing ear of the teacher; the performer looks back to the composer and forward to the listener; the listener looks back to the composer and performer, and perhaps forward to the possibilities of future music events.” (16)
In the case of the performer, the total stance of a pianist involves not only the way she engages the notes on the page, but also her imagining of the composer’s stance on the work, as well as the anticipated listener’s. Additionally, the materiality of the piano and its timbre, as well as her own physical skills and limitations, inform her performative stance. Stance, then, is multifaceted. Performance always involves foregrounding different “facet stances” at different moments—now melody, now timbre, now dynamics, now the intertextual reference of a musical quote.
Detailing practice in this manner requires a vocabulary that, as Berger admits, can feel cumbersome: facet stance, total stance, meta-stance, sedimented quasi-stance, stance-on-the-other, and so on. In fact, a glossary would be a welcome addition to a future edition of Stance. Nevertheless, the terms all refer to specific and identifiable experiences and there is a certain thrill in seeing these ephemeral everyday dynamics identified. There has been greater interest in affect in the past decade, with other folklore- and/or performance-oriented oriented scholars such as Kathleen Stewart (2007) and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (2003) writing on the embodied nature of knowing the world. While Berger’s approach is less poetically evocative than these authors’ works, it is far more systematic and amenable to emulation.
I, for one, hope his system will be picked up by others, particularly in my own primary fields of interest, sound studies and popular music studies. Berger’s phenomenological analysis of heavy metal guitar distortion, for instance, details the ways sound and its meanings emerge through the concatenation of embodied experience, cultural expectations, and technological affordances. In the wake of Bourdieu, popular music scholars have often portrayed musical participation in terms of distinction and the convertibility of musical knowledge into social and economic capital. However, taken too far, such an approach threatens to caricature cultural participation as—pardon the pun—“a capital offense.” Berger’s approach takes seriously the affective payoffs that give cultural knowledge its value to begin with, while situating them in a theoretically rigorous framework that allows for comparison and analysis. While one imagines that a subset of folklorists, ethnomusicologists, and others might fully engage in Berger’s project of “stance-oriented ethnography,” it seems likely that his detail-driven methods will be used to enrich and augment other approaches as well.
WORKS CITED
Berger, Harris M. 1999. Metal, Rock, and Jazz: Perception and the Phenomenology of Musical Experience, Music/Culture. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England.
Sedgwick, Eve K. 2003. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham: Duke University Press Books.
Stewart, Kathleen. 2007. Ordinary Affects. Durham: Duke University Press Books.
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[Review length: 1137 words • Review posted on December 5, 2011]