Journal articles on the topic 'Explicative paraphrase'

The Bima language action verb is one of the main word classes that is central and complex, this is evidenced from the verbs that are always present in speech, are determinants of the presence of arguments and have the authority to determine the semantic roles that exist in each accompanying argument. The purpose of this study was to determine the mapping and explication of action verbs with the notation of hitting. The method used is qualitative, the data source consists of oral data, written data and language intuition, language data taken from key informants. The technique used is interview and literature study. The method of collecting data is the proficient method, the Agih method with the application of transformation and insertion techniques. It is used to reveal the original meaning contained in BBM. The default meaning used to determine the semantic structure of VBBm by explication or paraphrase technique. The result of the research shows that the Bima language action verb `Hitting` has specific features. Generic 'general' does not refer to a particular location where the activity occurs, but specific 'special', instead it is thick with certain locations or body parts where and with which body parts an action can be realized.

This research aims to analyze the translation techniques used by translators to translate impoliteness markers in the film adaptation of Jane Austen’s "Pride and Prejudice". The approach used in this research was translation approach with descriptive qualitative research type because it was oriented towards translation products. This research data was taken from dialogue between characters in the film in which contains markers of impoliteness. Then, the data source in this research was taken from the film adaptation of Jane Austen’s "Pride and Prejudice". The translation technique used to analyze in this research are translation techniques compiled by Molina and Albir (2002). The results of this research showed that there were 12 translation techniques used by translator to translate impoliteness markers. These techniques are establishing equivalent, variation, implication, explication, discursive creation, paraphrase, borrowing, compensation, modulation, reduction, generalization, and transposition.

Dans cet article nous nous sommes penchés sur l’étude de mots composés et des phrasèmes en français et en espagnol dans le domaine du sport. Les études faites sur ce domaine relèvent plutôt du domaine spécifique de pratiques sportives comme le football. Mais le monde du sport est touché par d’autres disciplines (sports collectifs, individuels, de groupe) où s’imposent, à son tour, des termes nouveaux. Notre analyse a été effectué dans une perspective lexicologique, suivant les principes de la Lexicologie Explicative et Combinatoire (Mel’čuk et al. 1995), et à partir d’un corpus parallèle français-espagnol. Il provient de magazines de sport et porte sur plusieurs disciplines et domaines tels que la nutrition, la santé ou les exercices d’entraînement. Nous analysons les composés et les phrasèmes les plus représentatifs et fournissons les paraphrases auxquelles ils sont associés, et qui figurent dans les magazines. Le résultat de cette analyse nous amène à dévoiler la frontière parmi les composés et les phrasèmes.

AbstractThe Swedish naturalist Carl von Linné (1707-1778) wrote his entire scientific œuvre in Latin. Because of both the rarity and costliness of his books and the decline of Latin as the language of science in France, Linnæus' partisans tried from 1780 onwards to translate his major works into French. Quesné's integral translation of the Philosophia botanica of 1788 is characteristic of this attempt. But this enterprise encountered major difficulties, as some translators proposed a wholesale 'Frenchisation' of the Latin terminology, while others preferred to explicate Linnæus' terse style by means of paraphrases and commentaries. The origin of the problem resides in the fact that Linnæus had created a new language at once to describe and to name living beings. The translators' dilemma was also one of readership : were their translations to be used by experts or rather as pedagogical tools by learners?

La communication porte sur l’analyse des reformulations produites dans le discours oral. La reformulation est prise au sens large en tant que procédé de modification d’un segment par un autre mais elle garde toujours un lien sous-jacent entre les deux segments reformulés. Ce lien se manifeste à différents niveaux linguistiques : lexical, morphologique, sémantico-pragmatique. Généralement, les études sur la reformulation se fondent sur la présence de marqueurs. Le travail présenté montre que la reformulation peut être réalisée sans marqueurs également. Le segment source est interrompu et suivi par un segment reformulé. Cette interruption peut être « remplie » par un élément lexical : un marqueur qui introduit la reformulation (marqueur de reformulation « classique », marqueur de correction, marqueur d’exemplification, marqueur de conclusion), un élément disfluent (amorce, interjection, hésitation, marqueur discursif), un présentateur. Les raisons de la modification peuvent être nombreuses : correction, paraphrase, explication, définition, justification, conclusion, précision, dénomination, exemplification, etc. A partir de cette définition du procédé de reformulation, celui-ci est modélisé par un jeu d’étiquettes correspondantes selon lesquelles le corpus est annoté manuellement. La démarche est inductive et permet d’appréhender la reformulation sous un autre angle, ainsi que d’observer et de quantifier certaines de ses caractéristiques.

Journalistic text plays an important role in information transfer such as the latest events, issues, or problems from parts of the world. With the rapid development of digital platforms, journalistic can be accessed easily through the internet, which arouses the need for translation as a means to bridge understanding between languages. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate students’ strategies and errors in journalistic text translation. By referring to translation strategies adapted from Newmark (1988), Hoed (2006), Baker (2011), the target text was analyzed based on several strategies including transference, calque, naturalization, accepted translation, paraphrase, modulation, transposition, cultural equivalence, addition, omission, and explication. Based on the translation quality assessment model adapted from Nababan et al. (2012), the translations made by the students have decent quality for accuracy and a medium level of competence in producing acceptable translations. However, the translation products have a high degree of readability which means they are easy to understand. Based on the classification proposed by Sukur et al. (2020), the finding shows that the errors made by the students in translating journalistic texts include a lack of cultural background knowledge, situation concordance, use of unsuitable words to the context, and failure to understand speech act. With some suggestions to overcome those challenges, this study is expected to provide pedagogical insight for translation courses regarding the practice of journalistic translation.

The study reveales psycholinguistic peculiarities of understanding of indirect meaning of the proverbs and idioms of Ukrainian speaking pre-school children. The experiment took place on the basis of pre-school education establishments of Ukraine. The participation number is 378 children at the age of 5 years (till 5.5 years). The used psycholinguistic methods are: а) «evaluation of understanding of the indirect metaphors meaning» (Vygotskyi, 2000); b) «evaluation of proverbs understanding» (Luriia, 1998). The other used psycholinguistic methods are: а) «Proverbs understanding» (Luriia, 1998), adopted for the diagnoses of metaphoric understanding of idioms meaning by children; b) «The interpretation choice of one of the given variants of meanings» (Baskakova & Glukhov, 2008; Eliseeva, Gutsc & Marini, 2017); c) selection of one of several possible paraphrases (Winner, Rosenstiel & Gardner, 1976; Vosniadou & Ortony, 1983). Children were proposed to express themselves in order to find out how they understand given proverbs and idioms. If they had difficulties in meaning explication, so they were proposed some variants of proverbs and idioms interpretations, among which the first was correct (with indirect meaning) and the second with the direct meaning and the third with occasional associative meaning. The experiment proved such results: there are children with obvious intuitive language ability to feel the general meaning of proverbs and idioms. The part of children of the age of five years is able to verbalize the indirect proverb meaning (4,2%) and idioms meaning (7,4%). In the situation with one variant of meaning among some paraphrases 16,4% of children chose the correct proverb meaning, 20,4% of children chose the correct idiom meaning. More difficult for children’s understanding are proverbs, than idioms. It could be explained in the way, that idiomatic expressions are one whole and one nomination that a child often interprets in daily life from adults in some specific life situations. That is why he or she uses more quickly the heard word complex in a new association chain, abstracting from the direct meaning of idiomatic words. The proverb understanding is seen by child as more complex cognitive task, which foresees decipherment of the common thought or conclusion, understanding its meaning (implication). That is why the proverbs cause more problems among children than idioms.

Abstract In the spirit of the post-structuralist announcement of "the death of the author", this article discusses the rhetorical "death" of the translator and birth of the interpreter from three angles. I shall start with a discussion of the fluidity of meaning which results from the "death" of the author. I will then argue that the translator, as author of the translation, will also "die" and have no control over the production of meaning from the translated text. There will also be a brief discussion of translation failure, to support the notion that, technically, translation in the sense of precise reproduction of meaning is impossible. The last section of the article will announce the "birth" of the interpreter and discuss what inspiration his/her birth will provide to the profession. I am concerned with translation as a process of precise reproduction of meaning from one language to another and with interpretation as a process of presenting one's own understanding of the meaning by such means as active reading, construing, paraphrasing and explaining. Résumé Dans le même esprit que l'annonce post-structuraliste de "la mort de l'auteur", le présent article aborde, sous trois angles, la "mort" rhétorique du traducteur et la naissance de l'interprète. L'auteur aborde en premier lieu la fluidité significative qui résulte de la "mort" de l'auteur. Ensuite il argumente que le traducteur, en tant qu'auteur de la traduction, mourra à son tour et n'aura aucun contrôle sur la production de signification dans le texte traduit. L'auteur aborde aussi sommairement les échecs de la traduction pour soutenir la thèse suivant laquelle la traduction, en tant que reproduction précise de la signification est impossible du point de vue technique. Dans la dernière partie de l'article, l'auteur annonce la "naissance" de l'interprète et l'inspiration qu'elle représente pour la profession. La traduction l'intéresse surtout en tant que processus de reproduction précise de la signification d'une langue dans l'autre, et l'interprétation en tant que processus consistant à présenter sa propre compréhension de la signification au moyen des auxiliaires suivants: lecture active, construction, paraphrase et explication.

Abstract The paper examines English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) communication from a relevance-theoretic perspective. Communication in English as a Lingua Franca is a type of interaction in which multilingual speakers use a variety of linguistic and non-linguistic means to achieve mutual intelligibility and maximum communicative effectiveness. The interaction of the ad hoc and dynamic conditions results in the development of properties that become typical for communicative encounters, where successful communication and mutual intelligibility are the goals. ELF interaction is thus characterized by the presence of properties relating to communicative success and mutual understanding, often making these communicative encounters ‘distinct’. The paper argues, drawing on spontaneous spoken production of Ukrainian, Russian and Polish speakers of English, that ‘distinct’ properties of ELF interactions emerge due to the realization of the Principle of Relevance. If the Principle of Relevance guides speakers in their search for appropriate communicative strategies and means of expression, then this supports the view that communication in English as a Lingua Franca follows the principles of any human communication and contributes to conceptualizing ELF as natural human communication. As non-native speakers of English understand the nature of ELF interactions and its scope, namely participants’ limited communicative resources and mismatches in the common ground, they explicate and simplify their utterances, switch to other languages shared by the hearers, and accommodate to the hearers in terms of vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation. Doing so, speakers intuitively follow the Cognitive Principle of Relevance and the relevance-theoretic production strategy, allowing their interlocutors to process utterances and make inferences at low costs. The emergence of ELF-specific features, relating to achieving mutual intelligibility and maximum communicative effectiveness, such as the explicitness of proposition, accommodation, paraphrase and translanguaging are explained in terms of explicatures in the areas of free enrichment, reference assignment, disambiguation and ad hoc concept construction that contribute to providing a comprehensible input to the hearer. The paper is exploratory in suggesting directions that ELF research could further pursue.

The following article should not be dismissed as yet another attempt to construct a renewed round ofrevisionism in history. On the contrary, it aims to explore the possibility of scaling down the dominant Eurocentric epistemology that served as a basis for a stereotypical frame of knowledge about Central Asia. The majority of researchers of the region do not deem the need to review the scale of contradictory clashes created by the notion of Eurocentrism. The latter is reflected in numerous articles about the frozen (and sadly deadlock) dilemma on why and how were the lands of Tajiks, Uzbeks and Kazakhs divided. By publishing conventional analyses on the region's "clumsy separation", experts illustrate their subaltern, narrowly framed by the colonial world, knowledge and hence, remain as gravestones of the Eurocentric methodology. In the process of such explication, the most important role is allocated to the modern culture, which encouraged the formation of the paradox, represented to us via the paraphrased Soviet aphorism: modernity and coloniality are twin brothers. The initiation of the process of decolonizing the mind within the five republics of the region is possible. One of the solutions involves recognizing the integrity of the pluralist-cycled culture and philosophy of the region. The proposed act will allow shrinking the focus on the knowledge within the limited national units and frames (thus, lessening the degree of'fetishism of the national identity'), and rather creating conditions for designing the "bridge", linking different cultures, ideologies and institutional spaces in Central Asia, as a transnational intellectual matrix. The aforementioned theory will provide a basis and structure for empirical facts, and, therefore, drive the researchers from merely constituting to critically thinking, and consequently, inspire to come upon new approaches and fields of study, connecting them with the existing, colonial experiences. It is essential to highlight that based on this, a new dialogue may commence, where Central Asian scholars are regarded as equals to those of other research schools (both within and outside the region).

The article is devoted to the study of the Gospel metaphor in L. M. Leonov’s novel “The Pyramid” (1940–1994). The theme of associative and symbolic nature, religious, mysterial, and metaphorical context of the writer’s works is at the initial stage of research. The study material comprised the sea and fire metaphors, as well as other metaphorical images taken from the three synoptic Gospels of the Russian Synodal Bible, as well as the Revelation of John the Theologian with their abundance, miracles, visions and prophecies. Certain features of metaphorization in the “Pyramid” related to the philosophical and artistic essence of Leonov’s creative persona, ontologically sharpened vision of man and the world are studied. The proposed observations are of a preliminary and fragmentary nature. The task of the work is to reveal the metaphors that have become the most important element of Leonov’s artistic thinking and style. The methodology of the article is integrated with the Christian tradition of interpretation of the Old and New Testaments, patristic hermeneutics, and modern ideas about metaphor. The author uses cognitive and linguistic tools, as well as the modern studies of metaphor, to comment on the metaphorical images of the Gospel. The unity of the writer’s spiritual and aesthetic experience is revealed in the suprastructural figurative system generated by the craving for symbolization of events and characters. The metaphoric images of the novel serves as a bridge between the content of the Gospel canon and the author’s artistic logic, materialized in a chain of transformed biblical allegories, parables, and prophecies. In the text of the novel, they are replaced by metaphorical idioms that have a syncretical synthesized integrity. Leonov’s accretion metaphors form a new metaphorical field. Without losing their original spiritual and moral semantics, they become self-sufficient. Leonov’s philosophical and aesthetic intuition, which integrates different levels of reality and generates additional meanings. We can talk about the combination of metaphors, the double metaphor, the mixed, non-contradictory metaphor that unfolds in the novel and forms the basis of the narrative system. The result of the semantic explication of the direct Gospel metaphor was the assimilation of the meanings given by the Gospel text. With the help of extended metaphors and paraphrases, Leonov signifies the key ideas of the Pyramid. The main one is the tragic shifts in national destiny caused by the apostasy from Orthodoxy, from the foundations of Russian cultural identity. The metaphors considered in the article are graphically highlighted in the text of the “Pyramid.” Graphic accents in phrase metaphors are essential for the reader’s perception of the work. Metamorphic image archetypes of the Way, the Ship, and the Truth highlight the ideological and philosophical depths of Leonov’s last work.

AbstractToday, as announced by this special issue, the contest of interpretation against aesthetic experience appears urgent and timely. For surely a critical profession should clarify its sense of how to proceed before actually engaging to do so. But how are we to have any such sense in advance of an encounter with the literary text, ostensible object of the discipline? I argue that it is only within the limits of critique, as met with in the objectivity of the artwork, that we might be confident of our interpretations.To paraphrase Hegel, literary interpretation misses an advantage enjoyed by the natural sciences (Hegel 1959, 33). Although recourse may be made to individual works of formal writing in »evidence« of a theory, still, no literary interpretation can presume its methods to be already accepted. Moreover, purely »systematic or theoretical« discussions of interpretation ring hollow when and, indeed, because they are empty of perceptible content. For the honest reader, the literary artwork remains sensibly resilient or resistant to, not to say frustrating of, systematic discussions – and this must be taken into account. As readers (rather than philosophers) of literature we are in luck, for even (or especially) without determining the meaning of a given work, we have before us something that remains »outside« of us. In sustaining his or her attention to this external object (and in coming to regard it as an »artwork«), and thus compelled to see the qualitative distance within and structuring experience, the reader finds that the text is more than just some thing or technical device to conceal meaning. It is what Adorno calls »the objectivity« of the artwork produced by the »movement of the mind« of the subject that, I argue, critiques the apparent choice of independent meaning or independent sensuousness as alternative bases for interpretive practice (Adorno 1983, 19). The literary work, as it becomes objective for its reader, becomes too a limit upon how that reader interprets it, that is, a limit upon the merely subjective.The trouble with the question of whether to privilege the sensuousness or the meaning of art, is that it is framed as though this were still a choice to be made, as if the one could be isolated from, and be taken without concern for the other. Perhaps we cannot be reminded too often, as Claudia Brodsky reminds us, that not since the »first modern redefinition« of the »aesthetic« in Kant’s Third Critique could »specific content« be »considered in isolation from form«. No more can the critical project be put back into the bottle, than the »dynamism« of form articulated through Kant’s analysis of aesthetic judgment be reduced once more to either static form or content. The consideration of »meaning« isolated from form must remain, alas, the advantage of the natural sciences. If, as Brodsky continues with Kant’s definition, »dynamic, ›purposive‹ form causes our pleasure in the aesthetic«, then the consideration of sensory experience isolated from form »remains tied to [the] original, ancient meaning« of »aesthetic«, »that of pertaining to any sensory experience at all« (Brodsky 1997, 376). If subsequently it has come to seem as though the (external) »uncovering of meaning« and (internal) »aesthetic pleasure« are at incommunicable odds, we must recall that these two cannot be separated out from one another in the analysis of a perceptible object without the aesthetic disappearing entirely from view – for, by modern definition, the appearance of their mutual implication is what we mean when we call something an »aesthetic« object. The clean, absolute break between subject and object implicit in the ancient definition is irreparably complicated by Kant’s radical analysis of aesthetic perception and its implication that subjectivity and formal objecthood cannot be insulated, one from the other. Even when the ancient meaning of »aesthetic« is taken up in order to speak again of sensation as bracketed off from form, such considerations are not to our advantage as interpreters and critics of literature, but rather lead into other, more positive disciplines, having no purchase upon that doubling movement of the formal object and perceiving subject. The consequences of this critical redefinition for the practice of literary interpretation are still not settled, or even if theoretically settled, not yet absorbed into practice.The editors of this special issue have proposed an impasse in, or crisis between aesthetics and interpretation as our subject today. Within the tradition of aesthetics as dynamic form or double movement sketched here between Kant and Adorno, I locate another radical tradition of interpretation, that of black aesthetic critique. With the particular sensory availability of visual art in mind, this essay considers not only James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), but also a work in another medium and separated by a long century in the political arc of black subjects in the United States, an untitled etching by the artist Glenn Ligon. With reference to discussions by Darby English (2005), Marie de Brugerolle (1995) and Andrea Miller-Keller (1992), this essay analyzes the ways in which Ligon’s etching is irreducible to his political identity. For one of the most powerful effects of the visibly differentiated presence of Ligon’s work is its ability to make us »see« that the intentional structure of an artwork, i. e. the interrelating of parts internal to itself, much like the fictively »autobiographical« structure of ECM, does not so much »communicate« or teach us about race in the United States, as use patterned abstraction to critique the impulse to turn to aesthetic objects to explicate social conditions, extract recognizable meanings, or ground political decisions. These works do not allow themselves to be read unproblematically as about black lives or as representative of black situations. Their »difficulty« inhibits any reading (whether called phenomenological or ontological) in which the difference of material and representation, or the difference of the representational and the representative is collapsed in an attempt to enjoy a clearer, less troubled (less literary) view through the perspective ostensibly afforded by the (black authored) work, as though it were a transparent »window« either onto the world or »into« the (black) subject. Furthermore, because each of these works self-consciously situate themselves within the troubled socio-history of black autobiography, black literacy, and presupposing racialist ontologies, what I will describe as their objectivity upsets not only ontological accounts, but also those social fictions of race that, among other more lethal consequences, have interpreted and continue to interpret works such as these to be »representative« of black experience. Considering the canon of African American literature by closely examining selected texts containing critiques of that very category, I propose, as it were, a third way, one that heeds the artwork’s own critique of interpretation and so helps us to move beyond the impasse suggested by the editors. The potential of the art object is critical. The aim of the analytic work in this current study is to restore to our encounter with these works the capacities for aesthetic attention and judgement occasioned by all »authentic« artworks, that is, works that do not conform to their audiences’ expectations.

This research article discusses one of the translation strategies namely paraphrase. The method used is a mixed method of descriptive-comparative method with both quantitative and qualitative research approaches. The data source is the translation of a novel, Tarian Bumi written in Indonesian language as the source language text and ‘Earth Dance’ in English as the target language text. The data used for this research are taken from the first part of the novel. The background of this research is the phenomenon showing that from all the sentences in the first part of the novel, more than 50% are being paraphrased. To identify what linguistic units are paraphrased, what kinds of paraphrase involved and which paraphrase is used more than others are the objectives of this research. The results show that the paraphrases involve all linguistic units ranging from word, phrase, clause, to sentence. The paraphrase can be used individually or in a combination consisting of two paraphrases and among the four kinds of paraphrase, the explicative paraphrase is used more than others either it is used individually or in combination.

Lexicon ‘See’ as an English verb that means ‘perceive with the eyes’has different form oflexicon and different semantics meaning in Kupang Malay Language (KML). The lexiconsthat refer to ‘see’ are ‘lia’,‘loti’,‘malerok’, ‘maloi’ and‘pe’emata’. Those five lexicons havetheir own meaning. In order to understand those words deeply, such matters were analysedby a study using Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) theory.By applying descriptivequalitative method and paraphrase/ explication technique, the slightly different semanticfeatures of ‘lia’,‘loti’,‘malerok’, ‘maloi’ and‘pe’emata’ can be comprehensively revealed.

Studies involving translation explication has garnered interest in the translation field, especially in the field of Arab-Malay translation, where explication techniques are used to transfer information from a source language to the target language to ensure that the meaning conveyed is not misunderstood by the target readers. This study presents an analysis of the explicit meanings found in the translation of a book by Kalilah & Dimnah: The Inspiration of Cross-Time Scholars, which was translated by Siti Hadijah Mappeneding in 2017. This study is a qualitative study focusing on library research. The study adapts the theory introduced by Vinay and Darbelnet. As well as Klaudy& Karoly who introduced more in-depth and systematic interpretation procedures. The researcher selected 12 proverbs contained in this book as the corpus of research and examined the explicitation that occurs while a translator translates the proverb. Ten explicit techniques adapted from Mohamed Mostafa's (2016) study form the basis of the analysis. There are a number of techniques that have been explicitly identified as deemed as appropriate to translate Arabic proverbs to Malay. The thorough analysis involved analyzing the meaning of the proverbs and the explication techniques used by the translator. The study found that the translator used several explicit techniques like explicit paraphrase, ellipsis, lexical expansion, specialization, replacement and defining in translating Arabic proverbs to Malay.

This research focus on the translation of action verbs applying the Natural Semantic Metalanguge (NSM) approach proposed by Wierzbicka (1996), in case where the source language is Indonesia and the target language is English. Meanwhile, descriptive qualitative approach was applied in which the data were analyzed by explaining descriptively in paraphrases. Initially, the action verbs were identified in both source language (SL) text and target language (TL) text. Then, the meanings of the action verbs were mapped comprehensively into English by adopting exponential mapping technique and explication. The action verbs are derived from the small collection of semantic primitive 'DO' which is categorized as the prototypical concept of ACTION; DO, HAPPEN, MOVE, PUT, and GO.

Introduction“Cage rage” is one of the most famous Internet memes (Figure 1) which made Nicolas Cage's stylised and sometimes excessive acting style very popular. His outbursts became a subject of many Youtube videos, supercuts (see for instance Hanrahan) and analyses, which turned his rage into a pop-cultural phenomenon. Cage’s outbursts of rage and (over)acting are, according to him (Freeman), inspired by German expressionism as in films like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920). How should this style of acting and its position within the context of the Hollywood industry today be read in societal and political sense? Is “Cage rage” a symptom of our times? Rage might be a correct reaction to events such the financial crisis or the election of Donald Trump, but the question should also be posed, what comes after the rage, or as Slavoj Žižek often puts it, what comes the “morning after” (the revolution, the protests)?Fig. 1: One of the “Cage Rage” MemesDo we need “Cage rage” as a pop cultural reminder that, to paraphrase Gordon Gekko in Wall Street (1987), rage, for a lack of a better word, is good, or is it here to remind us, that it is a sort of an empty signifier that can only serve for catharsis on an individual level? Žižek, in a talk he gave in Vienna, speaks about rage in the context of revolutions:Rage, rebellion, new power, is a kind of a basic triad of every revolutionary process. First there is chaotic rage, people are not satisfied, they show it in a more or less violent way, without any clear goal and organisation. Then, when this rage gets articulated, organised, we get rebellion, with a minimal organisation and more or less clear awareness of who the enemy is. Finally, if rebellion succeeds, the new power confronts the immense task of organising the new society. The problem is that we almost never get this triad in its logical progression. Chaotic rage gets diluted or turns into rightist populism, rebellion succeeds but loses steam. (“Rage, Rebellion, New Power”)This means that, on the one hand, that rage could be effective. If we look at current events, we can witness the French president Emanuel Macron (if only partially) giving in to some of the demands of the gilets jaunes (yellow vests) protesters. In the recent past, the events of “Arab spring” are reminders of a watershed moment in the history of the participating nations; going back to the year 2000, Slobodan Milošević's regime in Serbia was toppled by the rage of the people who could not put up with his oligarchic rule — alongside international military intervention.On the other hand, all the outrage on the streets and in the media cannot simply “un-elect” or impeach Donald Trump from his position as the American President. It appears that President Trump seems to thrive on the liberal outrage against him, at the same time perpetuating outrage among his supporters against liberals and progressives in general. If we look back at the financial crisis of 2008 and the Occupy Wall Street movement, despite the outrage on the streets, the banks were bailed out and almost no one went to prison (Shephard). Finally, in post-Milošević Serbia, instead of true progressive changes taking place, the society continues to follow similar nationalistic patterns.It seems that many movements fail after expressing rage/aggression, a reaction against something or someone. Another recent example is Greece, where after the 2015 referendum, the left-wing coalition SYRIZA complied to the austerity measures of the Eurozone, thereby ignoring the will of the people, prompting its leaders Varoufakis and Tsipras falling out and the latter even being called a ‘traitor.’ Once more it turned out that, as Žižek states, “rage is not the beginning but also the outcome of failed emancipatory projects” ("Rage, Rebellion, New Power").Rage and IndividualismHollywood, as a part of the "cultural industry" (Adorno and Horkheimer), focuses almost exclusively on the individual’s rage, and even when it nears a critique of capitalism, the culprit always seems to be, like Gordon Gekko, an individual, a greedy or somehow depraved villain, and not the system. To illustrate this point, Žižek uses an example of The Fugitive (1993), where a doctor falsifies medical data for a big pharmaceutical company. Instead of making his character,a sincere and privately honest doctor who, because of the financial difficulties of the hospital in which he works, was lured into swallowing the bait of the pharmaceutical company, [the doctor is] transformed into a vicious, sneering, pathological character, as if psychological depravity […] somehow replaces and displaces the anonymous, utterly non-psychological drive of capital. (Violence 175)The violence that ensues–the hero confronting and beating up the bad guy–is according to Žižek mere passage a l’acte, an acting out, which at the same time, “serves as a lure, the very vehicle of ideological displacement” (Violence 175). The film, instead of pointing to the real culprit, in this case the capitalist pharmaceutical company diverts our gaze to the individual, psychotic villain.Other ‘progressive’ films that Hollywood has to offer chose individual rage, like in Tarantino's Kill Bill Volume I and II (2003/2004), with the story centred around a very personal revenge of a woman against her former husband. It is noted here that most of Nicholas Cage’s films, including his big budget movies and his many B-movies, remain outside the so-called ethos of “liberal Hollywood” (Powers, Rothman and Rothman). Conservative in nature, they support radical individualism, somewhat paradoxically combined with family values. This composite functions well values that go hand-in-hand with neoliberal capitalism. Surprisingly, this was pointed out by the guru of (neo)liberalism in global economy, by Milton Friedman: “as liberals, we take freedom of the individual, or perhaps the family, as our ultimate goal in judging social arrangements” (12). The explicit connections between capitalism, family and commercial film was noted earlier by Rudolf Arnheim (168). Family and traditional male/female roles therefore play an important role in Cage's films, by his daughter's murder in Tokarev (2014, alternative title: Rage); the rape of a young woman and Cage’s love interest in Vengeance: A Love Story (2017); the murder of his wife in Mandy (2018).The audience is supposed to identify with the plight of the father/husband plight, but in the case of Tokarev, it is precisely Cage's exaggerated acting that opens up a new possibility, inviting a different viewpoint on rage/revenge within the context of that film.Tokarev/RageAmong Cage's revenge films, Tokarev/Rage has a special storyline since it has a twist ending – it is not the Russian mafia, as he first suspected, but Cage’s own past that leads to the death of his daughter, as she and her friends find a gun (a Russian-made gun called ‘Tokarev’) in his house. He kept the gun as a trophy from his days as a criminal, and the girls start fooling around with it. The gun eventually goes off and his daughter gets shot in the head by her prospective boyfriend. After tracking down Russian mobsters and killing some of them, Cage’s character realises that his daughter’s death is in fact his own fault and it is his troubled past that came back to haunt him. Revenge therefore does not make any sense, rage turns into despair and his violence acts were literally meaningless – just acting out.Fig. 2: Acting Out – Cage in Tokarev/RageBut within the conservative framework of the film: the very excess of Cage’s acting, especially in the case of Tokarev/Rage, can be read as a critique of the way Hollywood treats these kinds of stories. Cage’s character development points out the absurdity of the exploitative way B-grade movies deal with such subjects, especially the way family is used in order to emotionally manipulate the audience. His explicit and deliberate overacting in certain scenes spits in the face of nuanced performances that are considered as “good acting.” Here, a more subdued performance that delivered a ‘genuine’ character portrayal in conflict, would bring an ideological view into play. “Cage Rage” seems to (perhaps without knowing it) unmask the film’s exploitation of violence. This author finds that Cage’s performance suffices to tear through the wall of the screen and he takes giant steps, crossing over boundaries by his embarrassing and awkward moments. Thus, his overacting and the way rage/revenge-storyline evolves, becomes as a sort of a “parapraxis”, the Freudian slip of the tongue, a term borrowed by Elsaesser and Wedel (131). In other words, parapraxis, as employed in film analysis means that a film can be ambiguous – or can be read ambiguously. Here, contradictory meanings can be localised within one particular film, but also open up a space for alternate interpretations of meanings and events in other movies of a similar genre.Hollywood’s celebration of rugged individualism is at its core ideology and usually overly obvious; but the impact this could on society and our understanding of rage and outrage is not to be underestimated. If Cage's “excess of acting” does function here as parapraxis this indicates firstly, the excessive individualism that these movies promote, but also the futility of rage.Rage and the Death DriveWhat are the origins of Nicholas Cage’s acting style? He has made claims to his connection to the silent film era, as expressive overstating, and melodrama was the norm without spoken dialogue to carry the story (see Gledhill). Cage also states that he wanted to be the “California Klaus Kinski” (“Nicolas Cage Breaks Down His Most Iconic Characters”). This author could imagine him in a role similar to Klaus Kinski’s in Werner Herzog's Nosferatu the Vampire (1979), a homage remake of the silent film masterpiece Nosferatu (1922). There remain outstanding differences between Cage and Kinski. It seems that Kinski was truly “crazy”, witnessed by his actions in the documentary My Best Fiend (1999), where he attacks his director and friend/fiend Werner Herzog with a machete. Kinski was constantly surrounded by the air of excessiveness, to this viewer, and his facial expressions appeared unbearably too expressive for the camera, whether in fiction or documentary films. Cage, despite also working with Herzog, does mostly act according to the traditional, method acting norms of the Hollywood cinema. Often he appears cool and subdued, perhaps merely present on screen and seemingly disinterested (as in the aforementioned Vengeance). His switching off between these two extremes can also be seen in Face/Off (1997), where he plays the drug crazed criminal Castor Troy, alongside the role of John Travolta’s ‘normal’ cop Sean Archer, his enemy. In Mandy, in the beginning of the film, before he goes on his revenge killing spree, he presents as a stoic and reserved character.So, phenomena like ‘Cage Rage’, connected to revenge and aggression and are displayed as violent acts, can serve as a stark reminder of the cataclysmic aspect of individual rage as integrated with the death drive – following Freud’s concept that aggression/death drive was significant for self-preservation (Nagera 48).As this author has observed, in fact Cage’s acting only occasionally has outbursts of stylised overacting, which is exactly what makes those outbursts so outstanding and excessive. Here, his acting is an excess itself, a sort of a “surplus” type of acting which recalls Žižek's interpretation of Freud's notion of the death drive:The Freudian death drive has nothing whatsoever to do with the craving for self-annihilation, for the return to the inorganic absence of any life-tension; it is, on the contrary, the very opposite of dying – a name for the “undead” eternal life itself, for the horrible fate of being caught in the endless repetitive cycle of wandering around in guilt and pain. (Parallax 62)Žižek continues to say that “humans are not simply alive, they are possessed by the strange drive to enjoy life in excess, passionately attached to a surplus which sticks out and derails the ordinary run of things” (Parallax 62). This is very similar to the mode of enjoyment detected in Cage’s over-acting.ViolenceRevenge and vigilantism are the staple themes of mass-audience Hollywood cinema and apart from Cage’s films previously mentioned. As Žižek reports, he views the violence depicted in films such as Death Wish (1974) to John Wick (2014) as “one of the key topics of American culture and ideology” (Parallax 343). But these outbursts of violence are simply, again, ‘acting out’ the passage a l’acte, which “enable us to discern the hidden obverse of the much-praised American individualism and self-reliance: the secret awareness that we are all helplessly thrown around by forces out of our control” (Parallax 343f.).Nicholas Cage’s performances express the epitome of being “thrown around by forces out of our control.” This author reads his expressionistic outbursts appear “possessed” by some strange, undead force. Rather than the radical individualism that is trumpeted in Hollywood films, this undead force takes over. The differences between his form of “Cage Rage” and others who are involved in revenge scenarios, are his iconic outbursts of rage/overacting. In his case, vengeance in his case is never a ‘dish best served cold,’ as the Klingon proverb expresses at the beginning of Kill Bill. But, paradoxically, this coldness might be exactly what one needs in the age of the resurgence of the right in politics which can be witnessed in America and Europe, and the outrage it continuously provokes. ConclusionRage has the potential to be positive; it can serve as a wake-up call to the injustices within society, and inspire reform as well as revolution. But rage is defined here as primarily an urge, a drive, something primordial, as an integral expression of the Lacanian Real (Žižek). This philosophic stance contends that in the process of symbolisation, or rage’s translation into language, this articulation tends to open up inconsistencies in a society, and causes the impetus to lose its power. As mentioned at the beginning of this article, the cycle of rage and the “morning after” which inevitably follows, seems to have a problematic sobering effect. (This effect is well known to anyone who was ever hungover and who therefore professed to ‘never drink again’ where feelings of guilt prevail, which erase the night before from existence.) The excess of rage before followed, this author contends, by the excess of rationality after the revolution are therefore at odds, indicating that a reconciliation between these two should happen, a negotiation, providing a passage from the primordial emotion of rage to the more rational awakening.‘Cage Rage’ and its many commentators and critics serve to remind us that reflection is required, and Žižek’s explication of filmic rage allows us to resist the temptation of enacting our rage that merely digresses to an ’acting out’ or a l'acte. In a way, Cage takes on our responsibility here, so we do not have to — not only because a catharsis is ‘achieved’ by watching his films, but as this argument suggests, we are shocked into reason by the very excessiveness of his acting out.Solutions may appear, this author notes, by divisive actors in society working towards generating a ‘sustained rage’ and to learn how to rationally protest. This call to protest need not happen only in an explosive, orgasmic way, but seek a sustainable method that does not exhaust itself after the ‘party’ is over. This reading of Nicholas Cage offers both models to learn from: if his rage could have positive effects, then Cage in his ‘stoic mode’, as in the first act of Mandy (Figure 3), should become a new meme which could provoke us to a potentially new revolutionary act–taking the time to think.Fig. 3: Mandy ReferencesAdorno, Theodor W., and Max Horkheimer. Dialektik der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag, 2006.Arnheim, Rudolf. Film als Kunst. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002.Cage, Nicolas. “Nicolas Cage Breaks Down His Most Iconic Characters.” 18 Sep. 2018. 19 Dec. 2018 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_WDLsLnOSM>. Death Wish. Dir. Michael Winner. Paramount Pictures/Universal International. 1974.Elsaesser, Thomas, and Michael Wedel. Körper, Tod und Technik: Metamorphosen des Kriegsfilms. Paderborn: Konstanz University Press, 2016.Freeman, Hadley. “Nicolas Cage: ‘If I Don't Have a Job to Do, I Can Be Very Self-Destructive.” The Guardian 1 Oct. 2018. 22 Nov. 2018 <https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/oct/01/nicolas-cage-if-i-dont-have-a-job-to-do-it-can-be-very-self-destructive>.Friedman, Milton. Capitalism and Freedom. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982.Gledhill, Christie. “Dialogue.” Cinema Journal 25.4 (1986): 44-8.Hanrahan, Harry. “Nicolas Cage Losing His Shit.” 1 Mar. 2011. 19 Dec. 2018 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOCF0BLf-BM>.John Wick. Dir. Chad Stahelski. Thunder Road Films. 2014.Kill Bill Vol I & II. Dir. Quentin Tarantino. Miramax. 2003/2004.Mandy. Dir. Panos Cosmatos. SpectreVision. 2018.My Best Fiend. Dir. Werner Herzog. Werner Herzog Filmproduktion. 1999.Nagera, Humberto, ed. Psychoanalytische Grundbegriffe: Eine Einführung in Sigmund Freuds Terminologie und Theoriebildung. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1998.Powers, Stephen, David J. Rothman, and Stanley Rothman. Hollywood’s America: Social and Political Themes in Motion Pictures. Boulder: Westview Press, 1996.Shephard, Alex. “What Occupy Wall Street Got Wrong.” The New Republic 14 Sep. 2016. 26 Feb. 2019 <https://newrepublic.com/article/136315/occupy-wall-street-got-wrong>.Tokarev/Rage. Dir. Paco Cabezas. Patriot Pictures. 2014.Vengeance: A Love Story. Dir. Johnny Martin. Patriot Pictures. 2017.Wall Street. Dir. Oliver Stone. 20th Century Fox. 1987. Žižek, Slavoj. The Parallax View. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009.———. “Rage, Rebellion, New Power.” Talk given at the Wiener Festwochen Theatre Festival, Mosse Lectures, 8 Nov. 2016. 19 Dec. 2018 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbmvCBFUsZ0&t=3482s>. ———. Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. London: Profile Books, 2009.

IntroductionInteractive improvisational musical spaces (which is to say, nearly all musical spaces) involve affective relations among bodies: between the bodies of human performers, between performers and active listeners, between the sonic "bodies" that comprise the multiple overlapping events that constitute a musical performance’s unfolding. Music scholarship tends to focus on either music’s sonic materialities (the sensible; what can be heard) or the cultural resonances that locate in and through music (the political or hermeneutic; how meaning is inscribed in and for a listening subject).An embodied turn, however, has recently been manifesting, bringing music scholarship into communication with feminist theory, queer theory, and approaches that foreground subjectivity and embodiment. Exemplary in this area are works by Naomi Cumming (who asks a critical question, “does the self form the sound, or the sound the self?;” Cumming 7), Suzanne Cusick, Marion Guck, Fred Maus, and Susan McClary. All of these scholars, in various ways, thematise the performative—what it feels like to make or experience music, and what effect that making or experiencing has on subject-formation.All of these authors strive to foreground the role of the performer and performativity in the context of the extended Western art music tradition. While each makes persuasive, significant points, my contention in this paper is that improvised music is a more fruitful starting place for thinking about embodiment and the co-constitutive relationship between performer and sound. That is, while (nearly) all music is improvised to a greater or lesser degree, the more radical contexts, in which paths are being selected and large-scale shapes drawn in the “heat of the moment,” can bring these issues into stark relief and serve as more productive entry points for thinking through crucial questions of embodiment, perspective, identity, and emergent meaning.Music-Improvisational ContextsA musical improvisational space is a “context,” in Lawrence Grossberg’s sense of the term (26), where acts of territorialisation unfold an ongoing process of meaning-constitution. Territorialisation refers to an always-ongoing process of mapping out a space within which subjects and objects are constituted (Deleuze and Guattari 314). I posit that musical acts of territorialising are performed by two kinds of bodies in mutually constitutive relationships: interacting corporeal performing bodies, with individual pasts, tendencies, wills, and affective attunements (Massumi, Semblance), and what I term musical-objects-as-bodies. This second category represents a way of considering music’s sonic materiality from an affective perspective—relational, internally differentiating, temporal. On the one hand musical-objects-as-bodies refer to the materiality of the now-ongoing music itself: from the speeds and slownesses of air molecules that are received by the ear and interpreted as sound in the brain, to notes and rhythms and musical gestures; to the various ways in which abstract forms are actively shaped by performers and interpreted by listeners, with their own individuated constellations of histories, tendencies, wants, attunements, and corporeal perspectives. On the other hand, musical-objects-as-bodies can refer to the histories, genres, dislocations, and nomadic movements that partially condition how sonic materialities are produced and perceived. These last two concepts should be read both in terms of how histories and genres become dislocated from themselves through the actions of practitioners, and as a priori principles—that is, not as aberrations that disrupt a norm, but as norms themselves.This involves two levels of abstraction: ascribing body-status to sound-complexes, and then doing the same for historical trajectories, cultural conditionings, and dislocations. Elizabeth Grosz asks us to theorise the body as “the threshold or borderline concept that hovers perilously and undecidably at the pivotal joint of binary pairs” (Grosz, Volatile 23); one such binary that is problematised is that of production and perception, which within the context of an improvising music ensemble are really two perspectives on the same phenomenon. The producers are also the perceivers, in other words. This is true of listeners too: acts of perception are themselves productive in the sense that they create contexts in which meanings emerge.In Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s language (46–54), an emerging context represents a plurality of milieux that are brought together in acts of territorialisation (and deterritorialisation; see below). The term “milieu” refers to the notion that acts of territorialisation always take place in the middle—they are always already bound up in ongoing processes of context-building. Nothing ever emerges from whole cloth; everything modifies by differential degree the contexts upon which it draws. In musical contexts, we might consider four types of milieux. External milieux are articulated by such factors as syntactic norms (what makes a piece of music sound like it belongs within a genre) and cultural conditionings. Internal milieux refer to what gives the elements of a piece of music a sense of belonging together, including formal designs, motivic structures, and melodic or harmonic singularities. An intermediary milieu involves the way gestures acquire sign-status in a context, thereby becoming meaningful. Annexed milieux are locations where new materials are absorbed and incorporated from without.Bodies ImprovisingA small example should put these points into focus. Four jazz musicians are on stage, performing a version of the well-known (in that community) song “Stella by Starlight.” External milieux here include the conventions of the genre: syntactic expectations, prescribed roles for different instruments, certain perspectives on historical performance practices. Internal milieux include the defining features of this song: its melody, harmonic progression, formal design. The performers’ affective attunements to the history of the song’s complex life so far form an intermediary milieu; note that that history is in a process of modification by the very act of the now-ongoing performance. Annexed milieux might include flights into the unexpected, fracturings of stylistic norms, or incorporations of other contexts into this one. The act of territorialisation is how these (and more) milieux are drawn together as forces in this performance, this time. Each performer is an agent, articulating sounds that represent the now-emerging object, this “Stella by Starlight.” Those articulated sounds, as musical-objects-as-bodies, conjoin with each other, and with performers, in ongoing processes of subject-formation.A double movement is at play in this characterisation. The first is strategic: thinking of musical forces as bodies in order to consider how relationships unfold between them in embodied terms—in terms of affect. But simultaneous with this is a reverse move that begins with affective forces and from there constructs those very bodies—human performing bodies as well as musical-objects-as-bodies. In other words, in order to draw lines between bodies that suggest contextual co-determinations where each exists in a continual process of engendering the other, we can turn to a consideration of the encounters between, and impingements of, affective forces through which bodies are constructed and actions are mobilised. This double movement is a paradox that requires three presuppositions. First, that bodies are indeed constituted through encounters of affective forces—this is Deleuze’s Spinozist claim (Deleuze, Spinoza 49–50). Second, that identity is performative within the context of a discourse. This is Judith Butler’s position, which I modify slightly to consider the potential of non- (or pre-) linguistic discourse, such as what can stem from drastic (active, experiential) music-syntactic spaces (Abbate). And third, that concepts like agency and passivity involve force-relations between human actors (with embodied perspectives, agencies, histories, tendencies, and diverse ranges of affective attunements), and the musical utterances expressed by and between them. Therefore, there is value in considering both actor and utterance as unfolding along the same plane, each participating in the other’s constitution.What is at stake when we conceive of sonic materiality in bodily terms in this way? The sounds produced in interactive music-improvisational settings are products of human agency. But there is a passive element to human musical-sound production. There is a degree of passivity that owes to learned behaviors, habits, and the singularities of one’s own history—this is the passive nature of Deleuze’s first synthesis of time (Deleuze, Difference 71–79), where past experiences and activities are drawn into a now-present action, partially conditioning it. Even overtly active selection in the living present is founded on this passivity, since one can only draw upon one’s own history and experience, which provides a limiting force on technique, which in turn directs expressive possibilities. In music-improvisation pedagogy, this might be phrased as “you can only play what you can hear.” Another way to say this is that passive synthesis conditions active selection.One way to overcome the foreclosure of possibility that necessarily falls out of passive synthesis is through interaction and engagement with the affective forces at play in interactive encounters. Through encounters, conditions for new possibilities emerge. The limiting concept “you can only play what you hear” is mitigated by an encounter with newly received stimuli: a heard gesture that invites further excavation of a motivic idea or that sparks a “line of flight” into a thus-far unthought-of next action. The way a newly received stimulus inspires new action is an affective encounter, and it re-conditions—it deterritorialises—the ongoing process of subject-formation. The encounter is a direct line drawn between the two types of bodies—that is, between the situated body of a producing and perceiving subject and the sonic materiality of a musical-object-as-body. While there are other kinds of encounters that unfold in the course of interactive musical performance (visual cues, for example, or tactile nearnesses), the events of heard sounds are the primary locations where bodies are constituted or subjects are formed. This is made transparent in a recent study by Schober and Spiro, where jazz musicians improvised together with no visual or tactile connection, relying solely on sound for their points of interactive contact. This suggested that jazz musicians are able to communicate effectively with only sonic data exchanged. That many improvisers play with their eyes closed, or with their backs to one another, only reinforces this.There are three aspects of sound that I wish to offer as support for a reading of musical objects as bodies. First is that sounds are temporally articulated and perceived. The materiality of sound is bound up with its temporality in ways that are more directly perceivable than many other worldly materialities. The obviousness of its temporally bound nature is one reason that music is used so often as an entry point for thinking through the ontological nature of time and process; viz. Husserl’s utilisation of musical melodies to explicate his phenomenology of internal time-consciousness, and Deleuze and Guattari’s location of acts of territorialisation in the (musical) refrain. Of course the distinction between sonic and other materialities is only a matter of degree: all matter, including bodies, is “continually subjected to transformation, to becoming, to unfolding over time” (Grosz, Time 79), but music foregrounds temporality in ways that many philosophers have found vivid and constructive.Second, musical sounds acquire meaning through their relationships with other sounds in contexts, both in the immediate context of the now-ongoing performance and in extended contexts of genre, syntax, and so on. Those relationships are with histories of past sounds, now-ongoing sounds, and future sounds expressed as results of accumulations of meaning-complexes. A gesture is played, and it acquires meaning through the ways it is “picked up” by differently attuned performers and listeners.In this sense, third, the line is blurred between action and agent; the distinction between the gesture and the execution of the gesture is effectively erased. From the performer’s perspective, how a gesture is “picked up” is made somewhat evident by the sonic materiality of the next gesture. This next gesture is a sign that represents the singularity of the performer’s affective attunement, or an expression of a stage (or, better, some now-ongoing aspect) of what Whitehead would call her “eventful” subjectivity (166–167). What is expressed is the way the performer is (actively or passively) attuning to the constellations of meanings that resonate in the event of the encounter with the musical-object-as-body, as that musical-object-as-body in turn expresses the history of past encounters that (actively or passively) engendered it. The present action as most-contracted expression of the past is Deleuze’s second synthesis of time, while the eventful way an action cuts into the future marks the time of his third synthesis (Deleuze, Difference 80–91).What is at stake in a turn to corporeality in music analysis? Nietzsche admonishes us to turn from the “facts” that the senses take in, process, and evaluate and re-begin our inquiry by questioning the body (272). This means, for music analysis, turning away from certain quantifiable aspects of sonic materiality (pitches, chords, rhythms, formal designs), towards the ways in which sounds are articulated by bodies in interactive contexts. This has been attempted from various perspectives in recent music scholarship, but again the reading of musical bodies I am pursuing foregrounds affective forces, eventful subject-formation, and performativity as identity, on the ground of improvised interaction. Improvising bodies engage in spaces where “all kinds of affects play their game” (Nietzsche 264), and they exist in constant states of change as they are impinged on by events (and as they impinge on events), those events also forming conduits to other bodies. Subjects are not just impinged on by events; they are events, processes, accumulations, and distributions of affective forces. As Grosz puts it, “the body codes the meanings projected onto it” (Volatile 18). In musical improvisation, performers are always in the process of becoming a subject, conditioned by the ways in which they are impinged upon by affective forces and the creative ways those impingements are taken up.Musical-objects-as-bodies, likewise, unfold as ongoing processes, their identity emerging through accumulations and distributions of relationships with other musical-objects-as-bodies. A musical gesture acquires meaning through the emerging context in which it participates, just as a performer acquires a sense of identity through acts of production and perception in, and that help create, a context. Moreover, an affective consideration of performer (as corporeal body) and musical gesture (as sonic utterance) involves “the torsion of one into the other, the passage, vector, or uncontrollable drift of the inside into the outside and the outside into the inside” (Grosz, Volatile xii). Grosz is describing the essential irreducibility of body and mind, but her language is compelling for thinking through the relationships between bodies and musical-objects-as-bodies as an ongoing co-constitutive, boundary-dissolving process.Bodies and/as AffectAffect begins in the in-between, in the productive space of the event in which bodies encounter one another. This is not, however, a pure in-between. Bodies are constructed by the ways in which affective forces impinge on them, but affective forces also stem from bodies. Bodies affect and are affected by one another, as Deleuze is fond of repeating (Spinoza 49). No affect, no bodies, but also no bodies, no affect. What does this mean? The in-between does not subvert corporeality, perspective, intention, or subjectivity, nor is there a hierarchical relation between them (that is, bodies do not emerge because of affective relations, nor the reverse). If we think of bodies as emergent subjectivities—as processes of subject-formation irreducibly connected to the ecological conditions in which they are acting—then the ways in which their identities come to be constructed are intricately connected to the performative utterances they are making and the variable ways they are taking up those utterances and folding them into their emergent processes of becoming. Here, the utterer–utterance distinction begins to break down. Judith Butler (24-25) argues that the ways in which bodies are defined emerge from performative acts, and that every such act constitutes a political action that contributes to the constitution of identity. As Butler writes, “that the gendered body is performative suggests that it has no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality” (136). Gender is a status that emerges through one’s actions in contexts—we perform gender, and by performing it we undergo a process of inscribing it on ourselves. This is one of many key points where music scholarship can learn from feminist theory. Like gender, musical identity is performed—we inscribe upon ourselves an emergent musical subjectivity through acts of performance and perception (which is itself a performance too, as an interaction with a musical-object-as-body).Performative acts, therefore, are not simply enacted by bodies; if identity is performed, then the acts themselves are what define the very bodies performing them. Again, the hierarchy breaks down: rather than beginning with a body (a subject) that acts, actions comprise what a body is, as an emergent subject, as the product of its actions. For Deleuze and Guattari, performed acts involve masks; masks do not disguise expression or identity but rather are expressions through which identity is drawn. “The mask does not hide the face, it is the face” (115); “the mask assures the […] construction of the face, the facialization of the head and the body: the mask is now the face itself, the abstraction or operation of the face. […] Never does the face assume a prior signifier or subject” (Deleuze and Guattari 181). In Butler’s terms, the performance does not presuppose the performer; the performer is the performance.Affect corresponds, then, not only to the pre-linguistic (Deleuze’s “dark precursor;” Difference 119–121) but also to the super-discursive: to the multiple embedded meaning-trajectories implicit in any discursive utterance; to the creative ways in which those meaning-trajectories can be taken up variably within the performance space; to the micro-political implications of both utterance and taking-up. Bergson writes: “[m]y body is […] in the aggregate of the material world […] receiving and giving back movement, with, perhaps, this difference only, that my body appears to choose, within certain limits, the manner in which it shall restore what it receives” (Bergson 4–5; also cited in Grosz, The Nick 165). This is exactly Grossberg’s “context,” by the way. The “manner in which it shall restore what it receives” refers, in the case of musically performing (corporeal) bodies, to how a gesture is taken up in a next performed action. In the case of musical-objects-as-bodies, conversely, it refers to how a next gesture contributes to the ongoing sense of meaning-accumulation in response to the ongoing flux of musical-objects-as-bodies within which it locates.In music-improvisational spaces, not only does the utterer–utterance, agent–action, or performer–­performed gesture distinction break down, but the distinction between performed and received gesture likewise blurs, in two senses: because of the nature of eventful subject-formation (whereby a musical gesture’s meaning is being drawn within its emergent context), and because the events of individual musical gestures are subsumed into larger composite events. This problematises the utterer-utterance breakdown by blurring the threshold between individual performed events, inviting a consideration of a paradoxical, but productive, excluded middle where musical-objects-as-bodies are both expressions of corporeal performative acts (engendering contextual subject-formations) and constituent elements of an emergent musical subjectivity (“the performance.” See Massumi (Parables) for more on productive engagements with the excluded middle). While beyond the scope of this paper, we might consider the radical co-constitution of different kinds of bodies in this way as a system, following Gregory Seigworth’s description: “the transitive effect undergone by a body (human or otherwise) in a system—a mobile and open system—composed of the various, innumerable forces of existing and the relations between those forces” (161).Performing Bodies and the Emergent WorkThis, ultimately, is my thesis: how to think about musical performance beginning with performing bodies rather than with a reified notion of musical materiality. Performing bodies are situated within the emerging context of improvised, interactive music-making. Musical utterances are enacted by those bodies, which are also taking up the utterances made by other bodies—as musical-objects-as-bodies. The context that is being built through this process of affective exchange is the performance (the this performance, this time of the jazz example above). Christopher Hasty writes,to perform, from per-formare is to really, actually (fully) form or shape. The ‘-ance’ of performance connotes action and process. The thing performed apart from or outside the forming is problematic. Is it a fixed, ideal form above or beyond (transcending), or beneath or behind (founding) the actual doing, a thing that can be known quite apart from the situated knowing itself? (200)The work–performance dichotomy that animates Hasty’s question (as well as those of Abbate, Goehr, and others) is not my question, since I suggest that using improvised music as an entry point into musical inquiry makes a turn to performance axiomatic. The improvised work is necessarily an active, emergent process, its particularities, boundaries, and meanings being drawn through its performed actions. Perhaps the question that underlies my query is, instead, how do we think about the processes of subject-formation that unfold through interactive music-making; how are performing and performed bodies being inscribed through what kinds of relationships with musical materialities?Is there, in the end, simply a musical body that subsumes both utterer and utterance, both subjectively-forming body and material sonic gesture? I do not wish to go quite that far, but I do wish to continue to problematise where one body stops and the next begins. To paraphrase one of themes of this special issue, where do the boundaries, thresholds, and intersections of musical bodies lie? Deleuze, following Spinoza, tells us frequently that we do not yet know what a body is capable of. This must be at least in part because we know not what a body is at any given point—the body, like the subject which we might now think of as no more than a sign, is in a process of becoming; there is no is (ontology), there is only and (conjunction). And there is no body, there are only bodies, for a body only exists in a complex and emergent ecological relationship with other bodies (see Grosz, Volatile 19). To conceive of porous thresholds between performing bodies and musical-objects-as-bodies is to foreground the performative aspects of improvised music-making and to break down the hierarchy, and possibly even the distinction, between agent, action, and the content of that action. Bodies of all types inscribe one another in ongoing acts of meaning-constitution: this is the properly drastic starting place for inquiry into the nature of musical process.ReferencesAbbate, Carolyn. “Music—Drastic or Gnostic?” Critical Inquiry 30.3 (2004): 505–536.Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. 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