The Middle Of Everything

Queer Relationality and Musical Form

“Unaccountably Queer,” the December issue of the journal differences, celebrates the 20th anniversary of Judith Butler’s Giving an Account of Oneself by convening leading queer and feminist theorists to consider how Butler’s work continues to shape these fields today. A philosophical inquiry into the nature of subjectivity, Butler’s book quickly reveals the subject as meaningfully (if partially) incoherent—in other words, because of the many ways in which it is impossible to fully “know” ourselves (as if a single, discrete thing), it is only in giving an account of ourselves to others that we are able to form a narrative about who we are that helps us hold onto something solid, helps us to navigate the world according to a sense of what sustains us. And because this account is necessarily relational—an act of sharing between people—Butler’s investigation of subjectivity also becomes a question of ethics.

I read this issue cover to cover and found the whole of it very worthwhile. For me, Musser and Cassius Adarir’s entries are particularly excellent, as they both probe limit cases, staging Butler’s Account with and against explicit challenges raised by the status of specific identity positions as rendered in our sociopolitical order: blackness for Musser and transness for Adair.¹ I also found Gill-Peterson’s article and Butler’s response illuminating, with the former critiquing the constitution of the trans subject in the global north as “a people in exile from something—or somewhere—to which they are ontologically entitled by virtue of having been persecuted” and the latter reflecting on paradoxical absence of autobiographical detail in Giving an Account.

I’ll leave interested readers to dive into these essays on their own. Beyond recommending the issue, in this post I want to pick up on one moment in one of the articles, which seemed to hold out the possibility of a musical connection (or at least raised it in my mind). Very briefly discussing Teagan Bradway’s “Renarratable Bonds: Queer Relationality in the Scene of Redress,” I want to consider its arguments about narrative in the context of musical form.

Narrative as Formal Structure

Bradway’s piece opens by claiming that queer theory has generally regarded narrative—the telling of a story structured around actions that constitute beginnings, middles, and ends—as a formality that belongs more properly to normative culture than to anything representative of queer life:

Despite dazzling experiments in storytelling, queer theory tends to understand narrative as an ideological structure that straightens out the kinks in the social order. From this perspective, narrative’s apparent drive toward closure enforces cisheteronormative identities and teleologies. (Bradway 2024, 150).

By “closure” what Bradway means here is the kind of ending that settles matters, defining the characters and the plot that precedes it by framing them in retrospect as the moving pieces that culminated in this final moment, no matter the consequences. This kind of finality is generally alien to queerness, which emphases “becoming” over “being,” insisting on multiplicity and ongoingness, the in-process nature of human life and ecological time or the idea that we are never finished becoming who we are. Put in simplistic terms, queer ontology moves from an understanding of the world as binary and accountable (ones and zeroes, say) to one of interconnected flowering, a co-dependent and unmanageable bloom.

How can art and culture better reflect the always-becoming worldview of queer theory, in contradistinction to mainstream capitalist storytelling that provides morals and prescriptions about how to be “properly” in an inherently corrupt order? In her essay, Bradway turns attention importance of the middle as a space of indeterminacy and possibility.

If we take closure as narrative’s organizing principle, then the middle becomes merely a function of the end, which retroactively determines the middle’s significance. By accentuating the ending, we forget the phenomenology of middleness, or what Levine and Ortiz-Robles describe as the “tough, imperfect, anxious, exciting experience of having decidedly left our beginnings behind, while never quite knowing what will happen to us in the end” (3). The middle is messy. Its messiness is not neatly tidied by an ending’s retrospection, nor does an ending contain the scattershot affects (anxiety, excitement) that middles unleash and on which narratives thrive. Because their trajectories are unmoored from the sharply codified plots of cisheteronormative kinship, queer and trans narratives have a talent for persisting in the middle (Freeman, Time). (Bradway 2024, 153)²

As usual, when I’m reading critical theory, I’m trying to think about how its arguments do or do not apply to music, which has been shown capable of structuring narrative into its very formal structure, even if a story is absent from any lyrical perspective. In other words, when a piece of music moves from one section to another, and that movement creates a sense of tension (and subsequently, perhaps, resolution), a story of some kind is being told. That this structure—let’s say in simplistic terms, “exposition, development, recapitulation”—is fundamental to western classical music accords with Bradway’s reading of narrative drive as an extension of mainstream hegemony, of the values and epistemologies of the patriarchal/heteronormative ruling class.³

Music in the Middle

How might music that seeks to stay in the messy middle get around the problem of time, or the fact that music in particular unfolds in lived time? In their article, Bradway goes on to describe how such queer investments can take the form of “recursive” or “queer inconsistency,” where the inadequacy of fixed forms requires us to reiterate, to try again, to keep narrating to others how we see ourselves in the context of the world. In the margin of the article, I wrote: “Queer inconsistency; in music, variation.” In other words, though the passage of music across linear time imposes a certain degree of progression into our listening experience, songs that explore reiterations, repetitions, variations within a single soundworld all work to counteract the sense that what we’re doing in music is marching triumphantly towards the end.

More than coincidentally, this dynamic is found in abundance with the music I studied for Big Feelings. As I talked about in this post, harmonic structures that establish and then plumb one single gesture allow the kind of queer and feminist indie rock that I’m talking about to swell and intensify, amplifying the affective (that is, emotional and musical) complexity throughout a given track, resisting linear progression in favor of sitting with what is.

Discussing a Vagabon track that makes use of the Big Feelings progression, I write in the book:

Once the song starts moving in earnest, its momentum never really abates. But this isn’t to say that “The Embers” tells a story; instead, narrative drive is almost entirely avoided in both the lyrics and the harmonic progression, which totally eschews the standard (masculine) linearity inherent to the Western harmonic musical tradition. Rock music has long undermined the “standard” functional tendencies of tonal harmony; but particularly when combined with the other aspects of Tamko’s performance, the circular movement between two chords—like Soccer Mommy’s “Cool”—resonates with and exemplifies Big Feelings’ rendering of non-masculine sensibilities, taking the time and interest to get inside a single feeling and in so doing rejecting the masculinist criticism of femininity as overly dramatic, making mountains out of molehills. In other words, to treat “small” feelings seriously—to give them their own space—is itself to critique masculine epistemologies organized around what is ostensibly rational, but what is actually an inability to intelligently navigate the world. On “The Embers,” Tamko builds a soundworld big enough to hold the contents of her inner experience, spilling out in performance.

This kind of indie rock is far from the only genre to explore what we might call the aesthetics of the middle; the album linked below, for example, is a powerful exploration of every kind of queer dynamic that I’ve gestured towards in this post and more, a totally sustained and curious unravelling of its own microtonal universe.⁴

It’s obviously too simplistic to suggest that all music which refuses narrative is queer⁵; musical forms are just one aspect of how sounds produce meaning, and any reading of what a piece signifies will inevitably become complicated by the perception of different listeners in different contexts. What we’re listening for, then, are patterns, tendencies, and affects—social and musical forces that clue us into what might be going on, or how an artist expresses sensibilities informed by their experience in the world. If concluding one way or the other is both impossible and beside the point, reiterating those questions amid shifting contexts might keep us in the middle of what matters.

Cry hard.

1. As I understand it, where Adair expands Butler’s theory through a reading of the history of trans and queer theory, Musser uses Black art and opacity to trace its limitations. Adair: “trans theory and cultural production from multiple racial and colonial subject positions is full of claims to a literal, rather than metaphorical, psychoanalytic, or philosophical, experience of being more than one person across a lifespan. But if this is so, does that also mean that the particular obscuration and fragmentation of my selves, collected under the sign of “transsexual,” provide unique insight into the larger project of inquiry into ethical intersubjective encounters?” Musser: “By refusing the terms of recognition and the accompanying extractive dynamics of racial capitalism, [Wilmer] Wilson [IV] calls into question the nature of value itself and gives us a way to think about what it is to offer an account of oneself that operates outside of recognition and well-worn norms of signification. If the norms of signification are paramount to understanding the ethical world produced in the interchanges between ‘you’ and ‘I,’ as Butler suggests, Wilson asks us not only to meditate on what has been left out of this frame, but he offers insight into how to apprehend relation and ethics outside of it.”

2. My emphasis

3. In my contemporary terms, we can hear the hegemony of capitalism and the work ethic that upholds it in the kind of pop music that Robin James associates with resilience: In the struggle between a character (chorus) and their circumstances (verse), the return of that final, triumphant chorus—what James calls “the soar”—signals a triumph of individual will that enfolds neoliberal resilience imperatives into musical form, valorizing as morally beautiful the individual struggle to succeed (read: profit) despite everything.

4. Thanks to my friend Kyle for the rec!

5. For example, while there are interesting critiques of western music to be found in the early history of minimalism, that musical tradition has subsequently become rather thoroughly incorporated into the academic mainstream, and in such a way as to consolidate the story of its actually messy beginning as one ostensibly pioneered by four (you guessed it) white male composers. The semiotics to which musical form may contribute are only ever partial in understanding how musical meaning is made, and can be overdetermined by the reputation of a genre of music that, in the example of minimalism, remains associated with a certain generation of composers in the Western construction. If you’re interested in parsing the radicality of minimalism’s emergence and its ongoing political reverberations amid its near complete institutionalization, can I recommend a book?