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Popular Culture Review
blind by the merging of two skins, instrument and human, and the singing of
routine conversation that occurs between hearing and sax noise, each of which
enables the other. During rehearsals, players hold their instruments in a
condition of visual arrest, carefully surveilling the points at which their bodies
meet those of their instruments. This is an unusual state of affairs. As Serres
argues, this version of vision is one that cannot be described as habitual, but is
one that is nevertheless honoured in traditional philosophy. The bearer of the
look in traditional philosophy remains motionless and “[s]its down to look,
through a window at the blossoming tree: a statue posed on affirmations and
theses.”^^
Serres suggests instead that “we rarely see things in a condition of
arrest,” and that viewing is not so much about looking and seeing objects as it is
about voyaging to or visiting with them.^"* The term “visit” and the verb “to
visit” mean at first looking and seeing; “they add to it the idea of itinerary—^the
one who visits goes to see.”^^ This notion of vision, as Connor notes, is “vision
on the move.”^^ This suggests that the body goes out of itself through sense, and
goes to visit or temporarily dwell in what, in this case, is seen. The player’s
body goes out of its role in performance, but not through vision. The band
member is blinded; all the surveillance equipment is shut off, and blindness is
indeed necessary for band members to become their instruments. Trumpets and
their players depend on the cover of darkness, the absence of bright self
surveillance light, in order to become each other. As soon as the observant
player starts to notice that his hands meet the surface of the trumpet body, the
union is over, and it is back to their separate lives.
Turning their sight away, band members go blind while their bodies
and instrument bodies take advantage of the darkness to join together like the
bodies of two surreptitious lovers. The metaphor of making love goes further,
because band members do regard the bodies of their instruments as lovers and
spoke of them as such. Band members used sexual metaphors of “fucking” on
the one hand, and “making love” on the other, to distinguish the difference
between engaging with their instruments during rehearsals and performances,
arguing that performing with an instrument was like making love, a nd that
rehearsing was akin to fucking. As band members made extensive explanations
of the difference between the two, it became clear that making love involved
“melting into someone’s body,” and that fucking involved appraising a desirable
body, but not being allowed to “connect with it.” It would seem that band
members are articulating an experiential logic that suggests that the act of
making love is vulnerable to breakdown when self-conscious attention is paid to
the machinations involved in it. Rehearsals, therefore, are broken-down,
disconnected, musical lovemaking sessions.
As players go blind in performances, their senses of musical smell and
taste, which, as I will describe below, are absent during rehearsal, return
heightened. In Serres’s work, odour is “the work of transformation, or