An analytical framework

How are music student subjectivities constitutedin and through discursive practices of musicianship in Musikklinja?

Posing a research question in this way quite explicitly demonstrates the project’s emphasis on Musikklinja as a site of discursive practice and

constitution of subjectivity. The terminology and characteristics of the phrasing signal specific theoretical affinities, and activate and bring into operation a certain field of possibility for analyses and discussions of music educational practices. The question can be asked only because of previous statements within the field, and the established practices in which such statements have a stage and an audience.

This understanding of a ‘statement’ serves to highlight the epistemological stance taken in the present project: statements, including research questions, are moves in what Foucault terms “games of truth” (2000a). Put the other way around, specific “games of truth” produce specific research questions whose value and legitimacy depends upon the already existing instances and procedures for distributing, interpreting and authorizing statements of similar kinds:

When I say “game”, I mean a set of rules by which truth is produced. It is not a game in the sense of an amusement; it is a set of procedures that lead to a certain result, which, on the basis of its principles and rules of procedure, may be considered valid or invalid, winning or losing. (Foucault, 2000a, p. 297) Formulating research questions, establishing the theoretical rationale underpinning them, designing the study that produce the answers; all these are procedures central to scientific and academic games of truth. This chapter has outlined and elaborated on some theoretical assumptions and rules regulating the field of possibility activated by my research question, and tried to clarify how they are brought into operation in the present study. The question is a legitimate move in a specific game of truth taking its rules from the poststructuralist epistemologies of cultural studies, Foucault’s theories on discourse and power/knowledge, and notions of performativity and subjectivation as developed by Butler.

Figure 1: Analytical framework

Before entering into a discussion of the challenges of combining such a

theoretical framework with ethnographic strategies of data production, I would like to present the theory as operationalized in my analytical approach. The analytical model below (figure 1) represents a researcher’s tool for addressing and thinking about processes of subjectivation and discursive meaning making.

As the project has developed, the model has taken various shapes; concepts have been replaced, emphases have changed. However, I have been intent on keeping the performative act at the centre of analytical (as well as ethnographic) attention. In and through the performative act, discourses are practiced – cited and reiterated. Power/knowledge-relations are enacted and subjectivities are enabled. It is, of course, tempting to conceptualize signification and subjectivation in a chronological order that takes off with the discursive imposition and lands in the successful subject. Moreover, the rhetoric of an analysis falls most easily into patterns of temporality and succession, rendering the chronological presentation almost inevitable. By placing the performative act in the centre of attention and disengaging from it the discursive practice of musicianship to the one side, and the constitution of music student subjectivity

The discursive practice

of musicianship The constitution of music

student subjectivity Situations of power/knowledge

Discources, subject positions, categories, frames of

reference

Strategies of negotiation Imposed

Submission

Mastery

Performed Performative act

discourse, powerandperformativity

to the other, I try to address the interplay between them while keeping sight of how they are performatively and paradoxically intertwined.

The analytical framework as illustrated by figure 1 corresponds to the deliberate and strategic division of the overall research question in two sub-questions:

• How is musicianship practiced in Musikklinja? (Left side of the figure)

• How are student subjectivities performed? (Right side of the figure) Mapping and investigating discourses of musicianship as practiced across a range of Musikklinja sites and activities (left side of the figure), I want to enable an understanding of the discursive conditions of possibility that govern music student subjectivity. In and through the performative act, discourses of musicianship are imposed and performed. The performing subject submits to discourse. Moving to the right side of the illustration and the second sub-question, the analytical focus is on the strategies of negotiation through which discourse is taken up and reiterated, and through which students enable subjective understandings of themselves as music students. Performative enactments entail, always, the citation and reiteration of discourse, and this reiteration allows for the adjustments necessary to emerge as master, as a legitimate music student subject.

The analytical framework sets acts of performative subjectivation within situations of power/knowledge. In this way, I want to emphasize that power/

knowledge is deployed and enacted in every signifying relation established throughout the event. Addressing issues of power/knowledge in Musikklinja, we can come to understandings of Musikklinja as an institution of discourse, of how discursive practices of musicianship are institutionally sustained, and how specific forms of music student subjectivity are enabled and maintained.

In the analyses of chapters six and seven, instances of performative

subjectivation in Musikklinja are discussed. Investigating how discourses of musicianship are enacted – imposed and performed – the analyses sometimes make use of a terminology identifying discursive ‘categories’ or ‘concepts’

or ‘frames of reference’. Where the first two fill the function of designating specific aspects within a discourse, the third is utilized in situations where the performative enactment takes the form of a very obvious explanatory narrative.

Moreover, the analyses make use of the concept ‘subject position’. In the present project, the term designates a specific position available in Musikklinja discourse, that of the ‘music student subject’. Rather than mapping and arriving

at a gallery of possible ‘music student subject positions’ though, the analyses address instantiations of the music student subject in performative practice.

In this, the ‘music student subject’ is understood as a main signifier open to various meanings in various situations rather than a definite configuration of specific qualities and competences.