And now, at last, the conclusion to my 2023 paper, “The ‘Tuning-In’ Relationship in Music and in Ethics.”
I’ll let it speak for itself.
Practices
An appeal to embodiment may be necessary to account for the tuning-in relationship, but it is not sufficient. Gestures and other bodily cues that mean one thing in one context may mean something entirely different in another. The inner unfolding of meaning in another person remains at least ambiguous, if not entirely opaque, without some wider shared context.
A concert violinist trying to join in with a Bluegrass jam would recognize what the others are doing as playing music in a certain key at a certain tempo, but might well misperceive important aspects of the social situation: the expectation of playing in the distinctive style of Bluegrass, and the expectation of adhering its complex etiquette concerning taking turns improvising on the tune and agreeing on when return to playing in unison, and when and how to end the tune. Much the same might happen were a Bluegrass mandolin player to join in with an old-time session,[i] which has a very different style and etiquette: blending in with others without showing off, easing into the groove of a tune and sustaining it for a while without any particular haste in drawing it to a close. Bluegrass mandolin is played with a hard chop on the off-beat, an approach likely to draw scowls of disapproval from old-time players and remarks about “chopping wood.”
To make sense of what is going on in their new situations, the concert violinist and the Bluegrass mandolin player must tune in to the wider and more general meaning of the unfamiliar social situations into which they have ventured. Schutz makes a similar point in his work on music, with an example of a pianist engaging in a familiar “type” of activity: a pianist sits down at a piano to play a sonata. Even if the pianist has never played this particular sonata before, he is nevertheless prepared to tune in to the composer’s intended meaning because they share in “a well-founded knowledge of the type of musical form called ‘sonata within the meaning of nineteenth century piano music’, the types of themes and harmonies used in such compositions of that period, of the expressional contents he may expect to find in them – in sum, of the typical ‘style’ in which it is to be executed” (Schutz 1951: 85).
Schutz’ appeal to “types” of activity connects back to his earlier model of the structure of the social world. Any face-to-face interaction is situated within a complex nesting of social relationships, from the concrete and immediate to the abstract and distant, all of which shape the expectations of participants. “I am always expecting others to behave in a definite way,” Schutz (1967: 185–86) writes in The Phenomenology of the Social World, but he goes on to clarify that aligning expectations among participants depends on their grasp of the “course-of-action type” in which they are engaged.
To build on one of Schutz’s examples, an appeal to “course-of-action” type makes it possible to observe people seated at a table intently focused on some sort of activity involving rectangles of cardstock and piles of small plastic discs and grasp that they are playing a typical game of poker. The players all share in the meaning of the activity, and each makes sense of the various gestures and expressions of others within that context. He emphasizes, however, that “only the typical is homogeneous,” and that the subjective experience of each player is “unique, unrepeatable, and incapable of being juxtaposed” (Schutz 1967: 186). And yet there they all are, playing poker together.
Schutz’s “course-of-action types” might also be characterized as ‘traditions’ or as ‘practices’ (see Benson 2003: 41), each of which concerns shared meaning-contexts, but with somewhat different connotations. ‘Tradition’ emphasizes the continuity of the past with the present, ways of doing things that have been handed down from one generation to the next through the overlapping of individual lives across time (Schutz 1967: 214). ‘Practice’ places emphasis on presently established, sometimes deliberately cultivated ways of doing things, which are deeply rooted in the characters of individuals and the mores of communities.
Of the two terms, ‘practice’ seems more suitable for the context of ethical interactions. In his reconstruction of Aristotle’s virtue ethics, for example, Alasdair MacIntyre (2007: 187) adopts ‘practice’ as the crux of his account. A practice, he writes, is
any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of achieving those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity.
MacIntyre (2007: 216) ascribes the meaning of practices to narrative rather than to theory: “man is in his actions and practice, as well as in his fictions, essentially a story-telling animal,” such that “I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’” There is possibly some tension between this and Schutz’s account of the tuning-in relationship, in that the latter suggests ways of sharing meaning that are more primordial even than narrative. That is a line of inquiry to be taken up in another context, however.
To check in on the young engineer one last time, the lead engineer’s pause makes sense to her only in the context of the type of meeting in which they are all participating. Someone merely observing the room without prior experience might think it is the closing minutes of a lecture in a university classroom, or some sort of religious observance involving arcane combinations of numbers and symbols, in which the instructor/priest has posed some final puzzle to his gathered students/congregants. To a participant, though, it is simply taken for granted that this is just final meeting of the design teams within an engineering firm, a course-of-action type which brings with it certain expectations of how things will flow.
The lead engineer also has a particular style in running such meetings, rooted in his character, which will be more or less familiar to the other participants depending on their past experiences. The firm also has a kind of character – an organizational culture – which shapes the expectations in the room. Some organizations welcome dissent and criticism as contributing to excellence of design; others discourage or actively suppress dissent as disruptions to managerial efficiency. What are the practices of this firm, and what do they imply about the lead engineer’s intentions in this moment? Being relatively new to the firm, the young engineer may not have caught on to some cues that are obvious to the other engineers.
Beyond this meeting and this firm stand the wider “standards of practice” of engineers as such: a profession is also a type of activity, a social role invested with expectations and responsibilities only some of which are expressed in writing as, for example, codes of ethics. Engineering as a set of practices is sometimes at odds with management as a set of practices, even when a single individual – perhaps the lead engineer who has stepped back and is scanning the room – plays both roles within an organization: an engineer is expected to “hold paramount” the safety of the public, for example, while a manager is expected to hold paramount the good functioning of the organization. Which role is the lead engineer playing now?
Tuning in to the meaning-context of the final moments of this meeting would, for the young engineer, be conditioned on her grasp of these and other practices. More experience in working as an engineer, in this firm, with these others, and under the direction of this lead engineer, might enable her to read the room more capably and to intervene – when necessary – with greater confidence. Even then, though, there would always be a degree of uncertainty: as Schutz emphasizes, the subjective experience of each participant is unique and never to be repeated.
To speak or not to speak, now or later: all options entail some risk, and call on the young engineer to act – or refrain from acting – with courage.
Conclusion
Schutz’s phenomenology of music-making brings to light important features of the pre-theoretical, pre-linguistic meaning of social situations generally. Most important is the tuning-in relationship, through which the inescapably polythetic constitution of meaning in the inner life of one participant comes into synchrony with the constitution of meaning in another. Schutz accounts for this through the interplay of internal and external time, though in doing so he explains only the what and not the how of shared meaning-contexts.
His account also points to two important preconditions of tuning in: embodiment as the middle term between internal and external time, and practices as more widely shared meaning-contexts which may persist across generations. For several reasons, Schutz does not give embodiment its due in his account, though his earlier work on course-of-action types sheds some light on the nature of practices. In all, though, these amount to promising leads for further investigation.
References
Benson, Bruce Ellis. 2003. The Improvisation of Musical Dialogue: A Phenomenology of Music (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge ; New York).
MacIntyre, Alisdair. 2007. After Virtue (University of Notre Dame Press: Notre Dame, Indiana).
Schutz, Alfred. 1951. ‘Making Music Together: A Study in Social Relationship’, Social Research, 18: 76–97. ———. 1967. The Phenomenology of the Social World (Northwestern University Press: Evanston, IL).
[i] “Old-time” is a longstanding musical tradition of the southern Appalachian Mountains; Bluegrass is a later derivative of old-time and other traditions that emerged in the work of professional musicians in the mid-twentieth century. Mandolin is not traditionally part of an old-time string band but may be tolerated under certain conditions.
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