“Agency”
I have previously stated a hypothesis that music expresses or motivates the experience of emotion without agency.
However the concept of “agency” is a bit problematic – for example, is dance agentic?
I have realised that what matters is not just the “agency”, but whether or not the agency is pragmatic. That is, is it about doing something practical to solve an actual problem?
Consider the response of a listener listening to a spoken description of a situation.
I propose that this response can be divided into two major parts:
- Emotional response – what emotion does the listener feel about the situation as described?
- Pragmatic response – what pragmatic action would the listener take in response to the situation, and, even if they have no immediate intention to act, what pragmatic thoughts do they have about what such action might be?
Based on this concept of pragmatic response, my hypothesis about music can be restated as follows:
- Music expresses or motivates the experience of an emotional response to a situation, while simultaneously discouraging or suppressing any pragmatic response to that situation.
This adjustment of the hypothesis resolves the question about the agenticity of dance, because dance is not a pragmatic response to any real world problem.
Song Lyrics
I have previously analysed the different ways that song lyrics can describe an emotional situation while being “non-agentic”:
- The song lyrics may outright tell the listener not to do anything.
- The protagonist may have acted agentically in the situation, but the song does not dwell on that aspect of the situation.
- The protagonist might, for one reason or another, not be able to do anything with regard to the situation.
These scenarios describe situations where a protagonist cannot or would not take any action to deal with the situation described in the song.
In those scenarios it is the nature of the situation that constrains the ability of the protagonist to think or act pragmatically. But we can also consider how the description of a situation can limit or constrain pragmatic thought or action.
Potentially a description can contain enough information to invoke an emotional response in the listener, but not provide enough information to enable the formulation of a pragmatic response.
For example, the lyrics might say: “my boyfriend has left me and I don’t think he is ever coming back”. But the lyrics do not expand any further on the specifics of the situation. In particular they do answer any of these questions:
- Why do you think your boyfriend left you?
- Did he have a list of complaints?
- Did he meet someone else? (What is she like?)
Of course some songs do provide some details and other songs provide other details. The important thing is that each song only provides some of the details, and what is left out prevents or constrains any attempt to formulate a pragmatic response.
That is:
- A song has lyrics that express a situation, providing enough detail to cause an emotional response in the listener.
- But, the lyrics leave out details that would be relevant to any pragmatic response that the listener might think about to deal with that situation.
So it’s not that the protagonist might or might not take some action in response to the scenario that the song describes, but rather that the song lyrics describing the scenario do not provide enough information for the listener to think about what those actions might be.
An Example Reconsidered: Bohemian Rhapsody
The dramatic lines of the first verse are:
- Mama, just killed a man
- Put a gun against his head, pulled my trigger, now he’s dead
- Mama, life had just begun
- But now I’ve gone and thrown it all away
The first two lines give some fairly specific detail. The next two lines don’t give us any additional detail – they just summarise the situation in a more abstract manner.
On the one hand this is a situation where there are two problems that have no solution –
- the victim is dead, and there isn’t any way to make them be not dead
- the protagonist is guilty of committing murder, and there isn’t any way for them to go back to not being a murderer
On the other hand, if this was in fact a situation where you the listener (as “Mama”) were expected to take some action to mitigate the consequences, there are quite a few additional relevant details you would want to know:
- Who was the victim?
- Why did the protagonist shoot them?
- Was it self-defense?
- Was there some extreme provocation involved?
- Where did it happen?
- Were there any witnesses?
If this was part of a new Netflix series that starts off with a scene where the protagonist puts a gun to the head of a man and then pulls the trigger, I’m pretty sure that eventually all or most of those details would be revealed to us as the story unfolded.
But in the song, we do not get any of that.
The most we get is:
- If I’m not back again this time tomorrow
- Carry on, carry on as if nothing really matters
This could be taken to mean that the protagonist has decided to go away (somewhere) to avoid getting into trouble for the murder they committed, but, again, no specific details are given.
In other words:
- Specific details of a situation are given which help invoke a strong emotional response
- Other highly relevant details are not given, and the absence of these details limits the ability or willingness of the listener to think about pragmatic actions that might be taken to deal with the situation.
To be continued …
That was just one particular example of lyrics of a well-known popular song.
To fully explore this hypothesis, we will need to analyse lots of lyrics.
So watch this space …