Music’s Aesthetic Untology: Understanding’s InMaterial Improvisations

Music provides a provocative landscape to consider a posthuman ontology of immanence for interpretive research. Since it is not an object per se, it challenges taken-for-granted beliefs about sense-making. This chapter reworks ontology as untology to reaffirm the aesthetics of hermeneutic understanding as a being always becoming anew as it differentiates itself from the flow of existence as sensible, and thus, as also inescapably implicated in world-making. The movement of understanding reverberates through unsettled meanings of sense, language, and being, opening up spaces for improvisations that disrupt their taken-for-granted definitions. Gadamer’s affinity for listening undermarks this hermeneutic process of re-composition. Since rhythms are immanent to linguisticality’s being and to world-making, interpreters are called upon to become compositional partners who attune their bodies to the polyphonic universe in which they find themselves immersed. The chapter concludes by suggesting a poetics of dissensus as a way to heed the ethical implications of rethinking interpretive inquiry as understanding’s improvisational attunements.