“Kali’s third hand is what Peter Szendy would call an “effiction,” a concept he borrows from an old figure of Latin rhetoric (effictio) that denoted the head-to-toe verbal fashioning of a body.”
“But Szendy also hears in this term a contraction of “fiction” and “efficacy.” The phantom limb is fabricated and yet effective. It has “a strange modality of insistence and persistence.””
“The effective body is less than the body that actually occupies space and yet more than mere artistic semblance.”
“Peter Szendy’s book is all about bodies, organs, limbs, and members that, like Kali’s third hand, do not exist apart from their fabrication in the body-to-body interaction of performance. Their existence, always on the point of becoming embodied, is felt in their effects.”
“Phantom Limbs: On Musical Limbs, translated by Will Bishop, thus makes the seemingly perverse claim that bodies do not make music, but that music makes bodies.”
“This is not merely an interaction between body and instrument, but a transformation through the engagement with the instrument; the performer experiences her “own” self as this body-to-body contact.”
“One version of organology would have it that there has been a continuous exteriorization of the human body into its spatial prostheses: limbs become musical instruments, internal organic cavities turn into external resonators and spaces such as theaters. The body, on this account, becomes increasingly instrumental until it is suddenly completely dispossessed.”
“But Szendy asks us to consider: what if the body were originarily instrumental, already dislocated from itself?”
“Szendy’s logic here owes much to his deconstructive heritage. But the book wears its philosophical learning lightly. There is no open hand-to-hand combat with Jacques Derrida or Jean-Luc Nancy. Their influence is nonetheless strongly felt in two premises that drive Szendy’s analysis.”
“The first — a recurring theme in Szendy’s work — is announced early on in Chapter One, when the author asks whether it is really possible to have a body. Is the body really mine when I withdraw my hands from the keyboard and its multiplication of fingers? Derrideans would label this “exappropriation.” There is never anything that is properly my own, the logic goes, and everything I seek to appropriate for myself always recedes beyond my grasp.”
“For this reason, too, musical performance is also an experience of body-to-body contact with one’s own body. It’s as if one encounters oneself anew in playing.”
“Closely related to the theme of the improper body is the second deconstructionist notion that animates Szendy’s readings. There is no “the” sense of touch, Nancy tells us. There is no “the” hand, no “the” ear, says Derrida, going hand-to-hand with Heidegger. So, too, there is no “the” body, no “the” limb. This is another way of saying that there is no hand that exists independently of its contact with the keyboard.”
“But the emphasis is not now on propriety, on the hand that does not belong, but on the problematic singleness of the organ. There is not a single right hand, but a proliferation of multiple hands and multiple fingers. So it is that there is a third hand in Kali, mirroring Derrida’s desire to add third members to our various pairs of organs: three hands or, like Nietzsche, a third ear. But even three is not enough. Music puts no limit on the number of fingers or hands it calls for.”
“What matters is the substitutability of the finger. Its capacity to be exchanged sets up a kind of general economy of the keyboard. You can play the keyboard with as many or as few fingers, or even with more than 10 or with none at all and just some substitute prosthesis, like a piece of fruit or a paint roller.”
“Each organ, each limb, each member is divided from itself. That is why there can be no “the” finger — not because there can be multiple fingers, but because there is no finger that could be constrained to a single definition or use.”
“Music, then, entails not just the creation of organs in greater number, but also their wholesale reinvention.”
“In his earlier book Listen (2008), Szendy adopted Catherine Malabou’s notion of “plasticity,” performing a deconstruction on the ear similar to the one he now performs on the finger and the hand. He established that “my” listening is never my “own.” I am always overhearing and rearranging someone else’s hearing.”
“And there is no “the” ear. It is split from itself into multiple uses and possibilities. So too with my finger. It is never “mine” but gains a life of its own, innervated by the body-to-body contact with the keyboard. At the same time, it is always split into multiple ways of striking, hitting, and stroking the keys.”
“Szendy’s provocative, counterintuitive claims resonate with another book that has recently come out in translation, Giorgio Agamben’s The Use of Bodies. Agamben is no stranger to deconstruction, with which he enjoys an ambivalent and often fraught relationship. The parallels are unmistakable.”
“Key to Agamben’s idea of a “new” or “free” use is that it shows it is impossible to “have” one’s body or to make “proper” use of it. Rather, this new use deactivates any canonical or normative use, instead freeing the body up for new possible uses.”
“A comparison of Phantom Limbs and The Use of Bodies reveals fascinating points of convergence and of tension, especially since the biopolitical dimension is largely absent from Szendy’s account of bodies.”
“Agamben, for example, thinks of the use of the body as the experience of a body being affected as it effects, of being affected by itself as it comes into contact with a body.”
“His refusal to distinguish between active and passive might challenge Szendy’s idea of a “peculiar agency of phantom limbs and organs that the musical body-to-body experience causes to emerge.””
“Challenging, too, is Agamben’s desire to hold onto a clandestine proximity of the body. Szendy’s account, true to its deconstructive impulse, focuses on the exteriority of the musician’s body and explicitly calls for “giving up on any privilege of figures of proximity or contact.” But what of the ways in which performance and the engagement with the instrument exposes the body’s uncanny intimacy?”
“There is surely in musical performance an experience not simply of the body being out there, observable in a mirror as an alienated mechanism, but also of the body being too close, of being subjected to, of suffering the body and all its idiosyncratic habits. Szendy, though, committed to Nancy’s idea of an originary resonant spacing, goes in a different direction.”
“For Agamben, it is essential that a new use of the body render its normative function inoperative.”
“This privative moment is also important for Malabou. Thinking of the brain’s infinite capacity to reinvent itself and to reform even through trauma, Malabou argues that plasticity is the capacity to take and to give form, but also to destroy it.”
“Ultimately, Szendy’s wide-ranging, deeply engaging tome is a history of musical bodies — more precisely, of the gradual emergence of the spacing between these bodies, which permits them to sound in the first place. Here Szendy is very close to Nancy, who thinks the originary dislocation at the heart of being as sonic resonance.”
“Szendy echoes one of Nancy’s terms: “areality.” This is less a question of music producing unreal bodies than of music’s assembling bodies, distributed over an area in space, and tying them to one another and to themselves only by threads.”
“Szendy draws attention, then, to the various couplings by which bodies resonate together, spread out in space.”
“Szendy’s historical narrative is innovative, but some might be left wondering as to its politics.”
“Szendy locates music’s political “engagement” in its capacity to create tiny deviations from organ to organ. If we can speak of a politics here, it consists in music’s capacity to reinvent the body.”
“Malabou has chastised the deconstruction of biopolitics for restricting the possibility of resistance to a symbolic plane discourse separate from biology and thereby repeating the biopolitical gesture par excellence of dividing life in two.”
“Instead, she has called for thinking political engagement on the basis of biological life’s capacity to reinvent itself. Through Szendy’s eyes, we begin to see music, with its fabrication of phantom sonorous bodies, as a possible site for such resistance. Quite radically, it is a politics that depends as much on untying bodies as on tying them together.”