Termites, Monsters, and Other Outsiders

By Andrew Ty

INTRODUCING MYSELF

The CFP for this Project Spectrum zine popped up on my Twitter timeline last year, a GIF from the American sitcom The Golden Girls drawing my attention. After clicking on the link and finding the whole project intriguing, I knew I needed time to think hard about my participation. I set a reminder to respond on the week of the deadline, which went past before I decided to finally give it a shot.

The reason I hesitated had much to do with feeling simultaneously inspired and daunted by this “graduate student-led coalition of music theorists, musicologists, and ethnomusicologists.” Even with the fine distinctions made by the naming of those three specific areas/fields/domains (oh, how we love spatial metaphors in academia!) of music studies to call scholars and researchers in those fields, I was worried I was overstepping and trespassing on somewhere I did not belong.

As a PhD candidate working on a thesis about audiovisual musicality and intermedial performance in the work of South Korean pop group BTS, my work could reasonably be categorised as popular music studies, a field with disciplinary origins and compositions that are also entangled in perplexities.1 For half a century, the journal Popular Music and Society has been pivotal in shaping how outsiders to “musicology proper” like myself approach pop music. A few years after that journal’s first issue in 1971, the work Simon Frith has done, spelled out explicitly in book titles like 1978’s The Sociology of Rock and Music for Pleasure: Essays on the Sociology of Pop a decade later, have also provided me with the foundation for how I understand the field.

SPECTRE/SPECTRUM

Oddly, however, in a doubled sense of being an outsider, not only am I outside musicology by working in popular music studies, I am also outside popular music studies, especially in its embedding in sociology. My approach is from screen studies, with many of my conceptual starting points originating from film theory. When I look at music videos, for instance, in addition to the rich work already being done by the music video scholars who I am now reading, I also bring with me ideas from film theorists that I hope are flexible enough to cover the kinds of multi-sensory musical texts I am examining. This is the disciplinary baggage I bring with me, here at the borders of the spectrum. I am, as it were, the spectre in the spectrum. (Boo!)

As I stand here, I remain aware of an important difference between the kind of marginalized scholars that Project Spectrum focuses on and those like me. Unlike the former, who face large-scale societal forces and institutional pressures, I am closer to an immigrant seeking entry in spaces that I hope will welcome me. Perhaps writing this is an important step to facilitate my entry and earn that welcome. Perhaps this is also why, when I saw the CFP for this zine, I felt ready, despite some hesitation I already mentioned, to participate.

The spaces I hope to enter—and here comes the blurring of the literally eccentric spatial geometries between Project Spectrum and music studies—are not hallowed inner circles. More inviting, I think, are the spaces here in the outskirts, the sidelines, the margins. Perhaps I can sense that “energy of plurality…a multiplicity that flows, eroding the petrified singularity” (Hankins, 2021, p. 156) of disciplinary purity in the Project Spectrum zine. I think I would like to feed that energy. What Hankins describes as a welcoming space for those deemed unfit to belong to the Institution seems the ideal place to reach. I imagine the zine-as-undercommons as somewhere I can be permitted to “unsettle,” where I can focus on my “occupation”—a loaded term I use not in terms of the seizure and takeover of lands belonging to others but in the activity of work that occupies me. 

Perhaps one way to be “unfit for subjection” is by refusing to be the (grammatical) subject of a process of occupation. Instead, I permit myself to be its object, an object that does not remain inert but is continuously activated by the dynamic processes of anti-disciplinary knowledge work and, most importantly, through the energies of the “we” that are generated by those who are unfit and cannot be disciplined. The activities happening here—“studying instead of working, fashioning things out of junk, frittering away perfectly good knowledge, misappropriating University resources” (Hankins, 2021, p. 155)—seem frenetic and playful, generative but without being productive in the narrow neoliberal outcomes-based sense of that term. I think of this kind of activity as being rather termite-like.

TERMITE ART, TERMITE WORK

In 1963, critic Manny Farber published an essay in Film Culture entitled “White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art.” His description of the latter as “a kind of squandering-beaverish endeavor that isn’t anywhere or for anything” (Farber, 1963, p. 242) seems apt for describing the unpredictable work that can emerge from and in the margins. It is a work characterised by mobility, as it “goes always forward eating its own boundaries, and likely as not, leaves nothing in its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity” (ibid.).

Both academic disciplines and academic networks differentiate themselves from each other through boundaries and borders. This is co-extensive with the spatial metaphors of areas/fields/domains I used and took note of in my second paragraph as the common, perhaps even dominant, metaphor by which we imagine and structure the world, including this specific one where our academic lives are set.

These days, much is made about how open these borders are, how porous these boundaries are, and I certainly acknowledge this.

But a world of open borders is not a world without borders. Some danger remains, however little, for the unfit, the unruly, and the undisciplined, especially if this openness is overstated and overestimated. The boundaries that do remain in such a world might be those that stay concealed by long standing traditions that have naturalised them to the point of invisibility. Manny Farber’s essay (and by extension, his life work) participates in thesethis kinds of boundary-crossing activities, too. “White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art” was published in a journal called Film Culture and while it does include profuse examples from cinema, it opens with a discussion of the contemporary art of painting and large-scale issues relating to what he calls the “burnt-out notion of a masterpiece” in art, particularly painting rather than film.

Farber does not actually use the word “termite art” but the more expansive and hybrid phrase “termite-tapeworm-fungus-moss art.” Biologically speaking, this is a monstrosity that fits no known taxonomies, but from another angle, it is a highly imaginative construction whose very set of “identities” enacts what it does, breaking boundaries to create something strange and new. Film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum describes how Farber’s tendency of

“Situating the movie on neither a screen nor a blackboard but inside a critic’s overactive head…obliges it to mingle with its immediate neighbors as well as some of its distant cousins, and what emerges from this mingling often has more to do with the world and its complexity—above all, as we experience it.

— (Rosenbaum,2 p. 71)

This focus on experience allows for a kind of film criticism that, in “[r]efusing to reach for final conclusions about anything—the ultimate aim of marketplace and university criticism alike—it can only revel and luxuriate in its own activity, hoping at best merely to keep up with rather than master the art that it engages” (Rosenbaum, p. 72). It is not so much that termite art generates termite criticism, but that termite criticism is a kind of termite art, determining its own values and boundaries, the spaces (in) which it unsettles.

TERMITE (MUSIC) SCHOLARSHIP

Marshall’s call for a “materialist sociology of music” depends on bringing in the listener’s perspective, as opposed to that of players or composers. Such writing is expected to look very different from established practices of traditional musicology. Most interestingly, Marshall hopes for “more connotative accounts of musical affect… new strategies for communicating how music feels (such as greater use of metaphor and using one’s own musical experience) rather than what it means” (Marshall, p. 168).

This sounds to me like a kind of music scholarship that allows itself to become “termite-tapeworm-fungus-moss art.” I may lack the formal background that the disciplines of music studies require, but perhaps I can fill the gaps with some other type of material. After all, knowledge is material, especially when we consider the myriad activities and processes with which we can engage with knowledge: acquiring, producing, distributing, sharing, reusing, even refusing.

I read what I can, pick out what I can use, find my way through. The thoughts and ideas I pick up and gather around me are in pieces, but I can retrofit these bits and pieces together. They hang together, sometimes loosely, but always a surprise. Sometimes, I need to fold down or even break a few little corners, just so I come up with something that approximates the shapes of my own ideas. I write these up–painstakingly drafting chapters of my thesis and conference papers but often also rambling in chat windows and online forums; discussing these ideas with others becomes a constant back-and-forth between understanding (mine and theirs) and misunderstanding (again, mine and theirs).

In all this activity, I also consider what I exclude from what I read. For example, when I read something with musical notation, I skip over it simply because I can’t read it well anyway. As a consumer of music rather than a practitioner, I am more inclined towards what sociologist Lee Marshall calls “more connotative accounts of musical affect.”3

In other words, I rely on prose as a way to read and write (about) music, approximating musical experiences I think about as best as I can with limited means. Sometimes, outside my research in popular music, I find myself curious about other ways to approach music in a scholarly and academic manner, but I know I must tread carefully. If, for example, I encounter a piece of writing and its framework and methods mention “Schenkerian analysis,” I know enough to say that I understand nothing about that approach and would not know how to use it, so I set it aside. But I must also confess that I have read enough about Schenker to know that the man behind those ideas would have no use, not just for the music I am examining, but also for me and people like me, so I also set him aside for that reason. Sometimes, what I exclude is not just about what I cannot use but what I refuse to use.

REINTRODUCING/REPRODUCING/REDUCING/REFUSING MYSELF

Every so often I look at the traces of my work. What I have built (and I am surprised whether I see them still intact or mutated in ways I did not foresee) is certainly part of my becoming-termite. Sometimes, however, I also look at what I have discarded and wonder how much of what I am is in what is excluded or refused. 

Going through knowledge this way, scrabbling on termite legs, means that I am always changing. I often have no trouble recognising myself, but sometimes, there are brief but not insignificant moments where I need to reassess and see what I have become. I have to get to know myself again, because I too am the knowledge I work with. Just like that knowledge, I too accumulate, like the bits and pieces that are made to fit in any kind of way, sometimes successfully. Or, perhaps, owing to all this activity, I am not just a termite but like several termites, gnawing away at the same structure in different spots. 

All this is disconcerting, I have to admit, but three years of this has helped accustom me to this kind of unsettling. I am from the Philippines but I am an offshore researcher enrolled in an Australian university studying the songs of a South Korean pop group through the way they exceed their status as performances of purely musical sound. I am aware of the work being done in popular music studies here, but the work I do is not a part of that. I have close contacts with staff and students from my university, but I have never seen them face to face. I study songs in a language I do not understand, paying attention to musical performances not just through what I can hear but what I can see and feel. Always, in all of these, I am neither fully inside nor outside but crossing in-between spaces. These specific conditions connect as well to the more general experience of most graduate students, and recognising this has helped me come to terms.

After all, being in the liminal state of becoming that every graduate student negotiates is perhaps what leaves me unsettled and unsettling, paradoxically belonging to the non-spaces where the unwelcome and the unfit gather. Think of what energies can be generated. Recognise that this kind of knowledge would be unprecedented. Imagine what monsters could be cavorting here but recognise that they will likely exceed what pictures tend to appear in the mind of the mainstream traditional bodies of scholarship. These termites are pests, and they are strange, but see how they move and see where they go. See what they make a home, and then, see them leave it all behind to go elsewhere and be something else.

Footnotes

After the publication of this article on March 14, 2022, it came to the attention of the author and of Project Spectrum that Dr. Nicole Marchesseau has also published and presented research on outsider music, “termite art,” and liminality. We encourage you to consult Dr. Marchesseau’s work if you wish to explore these topics further.

[1] My references for this include “The sociology of popular music, interdisciplinarity, and aesthetic autonomy” by Lee Marshall, a 2011 paper proposing what he calls a “materialist sociology of music,” and the difficult but necessary questions Tom Perchard raises in his 2017 book review “Growing Old Together: Pop Studies and Music Sociology Today.” Georgina Born’s 2007 Dent Medal Address “For a Relational Musicology: Music and Interdisciplinarity, Beyond the Practice Turn” also mentions how popular music studies is “associated firmly with sociology.”

[2] Jonathan Rosenbaum’s “They Drive By Night: The Criticism of Manny Farber” is reprinted in Placing Movies: The Practice of Film Criticism.

[3] Marshall uses this phrase to describe the “materialist sociology of music” he urges his fellow sociologists to deploy in his article “The sociology of popular music, interdisciplinarity and aesthetic autonomy,” which was published in The British Journal of Sociology 62.1 (2011).

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