Discussion of findings
7.2 Agency within the musical practice
This assertion will lead us to consider the second research question for this thesis: How do participants gain agency through musical performance and in what forms?
For any understanding of music as a means of social transformation, a central discussion concerns the notion of agency, i.e. the possibilities for action, or how and to what degree musical agents can negotiate, challenge, extend, and trans-form the social relations in which they are embedded. The previous studies of the music program in Rashidieh have generally found that the music activities involve a range of opportunities for extending the participants’ agency. The musical learning achieved through participation in the program is seen to offer
“alternative ways of understanding one’s life,” and “a repertoire of roles which will partly challenge the limits they usually meet and which will open new pos-sibilities and thus a hope about how to shape their own future” (Storsve et al., 2010, para. “Learning and identity”). Such possibilities are especially connected to the way the music activities constitute a distinct space in which experiences of mutuality and recognition can come to the fore through musical interaction (Boeskov, 2013a). And, as Ruud (2011, 2012) notes, while music making may be inadequate as a response to the massive social and political marginalization and deprivation of the Palestinian community, the music program does offer opportunities for experiences of meaning, participation and belonging that allow for a sense of control, identity development, and possibilities for action, including political action. Thus, in the previous studies of the program, the music activities are depicted as resources through which the participants extend their possibilities for action and develop their personal and collective identities.
In article 4, “Music, Agency, and Social Transformation,” I problematize these conceptions by addressing the participants’ agency as instances of discursive agency. Following Butler (1993/2011, 1997a, 1997b, 1999), agency must be thought of as constituted within existing norms, which are then reaffirmed in the sub-ject’s own acting. The possibility for resistance lies in the way such norms must be continuously reiterated in order to sustain their legitimacy, a process that introduces a certain instability and the possibility of subversion. However, as I
discuss with reference to the work of Mahmood (2001, 2005), agency should not solely be mapped upon an axis of reproduction/subversion. Instead, employing Mahmood’s notion of docile agency, I show how norms can be inhabited and consummated in various ways, and how instances of agency may draw upon and contest different lines of authority and legitimacy.
I draw on this conception of agency when I advance a central argument con-cerning the constitution of the participants’ agency within the music program.
In order for the participants to exercise and extend their agency, their actions must be legitimized by some kind of authority within the social field. In article 4, I discuss three different instances of agency and how they are premised upon a preexisting and socially recognized order. First, I consider how through musical performance the participants are enabled to resignify Palestinian identity and dissociate it from denigrating terms like criminality, terrorism, and displace-ment and instead attach to this identity category positive connotations of
“humanness.” Second, I point to how musical performance may enable female participants to exceed some of the gender norms to which they are normally subjected. While young women living in this context are sometimes discouraged from participating in the musical activities because of conservative percep-tions of proper conduct, I point to how invoking the moral codes of feminine decency and Palestinian nationalism can provide the female participants Hanin and Daleen with the necessary legitimacy for them to pursue their interest in music. Finally, I explore the case of Ali, a young saxophonist who uses the legitimacy that Western pop music has achieved within the context of the cultural-exchange program to distance himself from an Arabic identity and perform a hybrid Eastern/Western identity. Thereby, Ali asserts for himself a more generation-specific identity that transcends “the national” as the primary form of identification.
Seen in this way, the musical practice offers various resources for the partici-pants to put to use when performing and constructing their personal and col-lective selves. The crucial difference between the conception of musical agency advanced here and that found in the former studies of the program lies in how the agentive capacity of music making is not solely ascribed to the musical practice itself, but is also connected to the structures of authority and legitimacy located within the social and institutional context of the musical practice. Yet, these structures cannot be seen as fully determining the participants’ agency.
As Butler has shown, the social and discursive formations within which the subjects act are vulnerable to false citations of convention that may “have the
effect of challenging existing forms of legitimacy, breaking open the possibility of future forms” (Butler, 1997a, p. 147). However, in the context of the music program, agency is not primarily connected to subversive action that displaces existing social norms. Rather, it seems that participants make use of specific lines of authority, most notably the legitimacy of Palestinian national politics, to resignify, negotiate, or extend other norms or categories within which they conduct their lives, e.g. the moral codes pertaining to the proper conduct of young women. However, the possibilities of invoking alternative authorizing structures should not be seen as limitless. It is highly questionable, for example, whether Hanin and Daleen could retain their claim to feminine decency if they decided to join Ali in performances of Western pop music. In this way, agency is distributed relative to existing hierarchies of legitimacy, without necessarily being fully decided once and for all.
Similar to Bourdieu’s (1991) discussion of rites of institution (see section 4.2), agency within the musical practice can be seen as dually connected to a trans-formative and a reproductive function. The transtrans-formative potential of music making concerns how participants are enabled to elaborate and perform an alternative sense of self using the resources the musical practice provides. The reproductive function is connected to how these resources rely on wider social and institutional structures that are then reinforced and legitimated at the very moment the musical agents make use of the resources on offer. While musical performance offers the participants specific possibilities for repositioning themselves in the social space, the boundaries of that space are simultaneously reinforced and naturalized as the terms within which social reality can be adequately interpreted. There is a sense, though, in which these boundaries themselves are also subject to reconfiguration in the musical performance. As the participants of the musical practice accept their position as docile agents of a particular structure of authority, they are granted some opportunities for inhabiting this structure in unexpected ways that, over time, may congeal and provide the participants with alternate ways of imagining their futures.
While I maintain that the sources of the participants’ agency should be located on social and institutional levels as much as on the level of musical practice itself, it is important to consider the role of musical performance when sub-jects negotiate and extend the discursive boundaries within which they are constituted. I believe that the sense of in-betweenness or ambiguity that is ascribed to performative action in the tradition of performance studies holds an explanatory force for understanding how performers can play with or explore
the boundaries of the norms, without risking social exclusion. Inside the frame of cultural performance, the identity of the performers is rendered ambigu-ous—in the words of Schechner (1985), they are simultaneously “not me” and
“not not me” (p. 113)—and, therefore, it is not always fully determinable for the audience or for the performers themselves in relation to what social codes the performative actions should be judged, aside from the purely aesthetical ones. This ambiguity can be utilized for rendering existing identities and social relations unstable. The performative frame opens up a liminal space in which meanings and relations are not fixed, and it is in this space of the in-between that young Palestinians are enabled to resignify their cultural identity, escape the limits of gendered norms, and transcend the national as the primary category for self-understanding, while simultaneously—and paradoxically—reaffirming the deeper levels of their social constitution.
7.3