The Musical Subject, Technoculture And Curriculum In The Postmodern Condition

Abstract

Through an engagement with the notion of `globalisation' and `subjectivity', I argue that the politics of musical knowledge involved in global empires not only defines and enframes the global musical subject, but subverts impulses towards democratic practices. The subjectifying experiences thus provided require music education's engagement with the state of musical knowledge in the postmodern condition - a critical awareness of the revolutionising of the arts, music, and communication through digital aesthetics. Technological ordering processes impinge upon institutional sites such as schools through curriculum prescriptions where discourses of official music educational knowledge are conditioned and unquestioned. Musical production is increasingly framed on technology's terms. I interrogate technology in the New Zealand music curriculum, exemplifying the political construction of musical knowledge within the global neoliberal policy environment. Collective memory involves a politics of knowledge, no less a politics of musical knowledge. The sites of construction of community in the musical organisation of collective memory require interrogation for ideological purposes. Critical philosophical questions therefore need to be brought to the music educators' table about technology. Heidegger's questioning concerning technology exposes ontological questions concerning technology's role in the ordering and construction of musicality as a site of identity — `being musical' and the protection of musicality become critical issues. Enlightenment metanarratives of individualism, autonomy and freedom are reinvoked suggesting the wisdom of Lyotard's (1984) claim that postmodernism is modernism in its “nascent state”.