On madness and eros: Thoughts on an arrested present

Abstract

This article listens through an account given by a participant interviewed as part of an ongoing project on abuse in music-pedagogical and music-professional spaces in South Africa. It follows two trajectories in this account, which narrates the relationship between the participant, music and the master pedagogue: one that narrates the potential held in the relation between master and disciple in the language of freedom and self-realisation, the other in the language of madness and the asylum. How might this account be heard in the arrested present of post-apartheid South Africa? This article offers two responses. First, it argues that the emotional abuse described in the music-pedagogical account at the centre of this article enacts a foreclosure of the erotics of knowledge and communication some have seen as fundamental both to pedagogy and political emancipation. Second, the failure, artistically and politically, to which this pedagogical encounter leads – a failure at the practice of Western art music which, in apartheid South Africa, marked out the cultural preserve of whiteness – constitutes a very particular kind of failure that puts bodies in those places assigned to them by apartheid. Taken together, the account and these responses show how apartheid is sedimented pedagogically as a renewed affront that plays with desire as it refuses knowledge and emancipative politics.
Contribution: This article is the first to consider abuse in classical music pedagogy in South Africa and suggests new theoretical ground by theorising ‘the pornographic in pedagogy’.