Animation, Plasticity, and Music in Italy, 1770-1830 by Ellen Lockhart

Author:Ellen Lockhart [Lockhart, Ellen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Music, History & Criticism
ISBN: 9780520284432
Google: JbEvDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Published: 2017-09-19T00:49:22.930000+00:00

CHAPTER 4

Partial Animacy and Blind Listening in Napoleonic Italy

Since the middle of the eighteenth century, fables of animation had been a means of thinking in empirical terms about human sociability: the body’s aptitude for becoming a sociable being through sense-percepts and being malleable in the hands of authority. Condillac imagined his famous statue at least partially in response to Diderot’s accounts of the strange, violent, isolated, and atheistic lives of the deaf mute and the blind.1 In the Napoleonic years, as Italian audiences began to lose their taste for Pygmalion and Galatea on the stage and as the imagery of animation was put in the service of nation-building, the issue of perception-based sociability came again to the fore. This chapter has two interrelated aims, both of which hinge on the idea of a correspondence or affinity that was understood to exist between statuary being and states of sensory loss: paralysis, obviously, but also blindness, deafness, and muteness. First, I will discuss the final flourishing of the living statue on Italian stages in the first years of the nineteenth century. During this period, the animated statue-woman, or Galatea figure, waned in popularity and was eclipsed by the spectacle of an animated statue-population. Second, I will trace the ways in which the notion of a plastic-human threshold became useful in constructions of the biological body, in the realms of both aesthetics and anatomical science. In other words, Pygmalion narratives of plasticity and animation came to be applied not merely to statues but also to living humans with inert body parts, particularly inert sensing organs.

These narratives gave rise to an understanding of the fine arts as compensatory media, making up for missing senses: those who lacked a full access to the phenomenal world were able to communicate by means of fine-art materials. In a metaphorical turn that is not entirely beside the point, we might say that blindness, deafness, muteness, and muscular paralysis became the white marble of the aesthetician’s atelier. And herein was another crucial stage in the reevaluation of untexted music that occurred during this period. This interest in sensory absence will necessarily take us away from opera and pantomime—which were essentially understood as mimesis in which music participated—toward art forms like instrumental music that were considered to traffic in partial signifiers and incompletely perceived mimesis. Finally, this chapter will reintersect with mainstream musicological history to consider how the picture of music’s role within the aesthetic regime around 1800 has been complicated and how these complications might make available new kinds of listening experiences, allowing us to identify surprising adjacencies over disciplinary borders. Although the language of animation and plasticity has receded from view within music-aesthetic historiography, I will suggest that it has survived, meanings intact, in a very different sphere.

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