Enlightenment aesthetics can also be brought into the Neo-liberal conundrum. Neo-liberalism is an inherently soulless economic policy- literally depicting the ‘marketisation of everything’ (David Harvey, ‘Neoliberalism as creative destruction’, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 610, March 2007, pp.22-44.) The decline of the metaphysical and the dawn of mass capitalism now seem synonymous with each-other; with the world of marketisation crushing any practical need for what is hypothesized beyond the eye, beyond ‘the cave’. Trapped in our Neo-liberal cave, only able to see the bareness around us, makes it hard to see a use for the meta-physical in the 21st century.
It may seem far away from the truth collecting used by Weizman, but I insist that it is necessary to act on multiple levels to work against Neo-Liberalism. Duality in the twenty-century have become one the key ways that systems in place have been fought. Mari Matsuda discusses the unification of ‘nitty-gritty detail’ and ‘abstraction’ as ‘multiple consciousness’, that can communicate with-in and beyond systemic problems. (Mari J Matsuda, When the first Quail calls: Multiple Consciousness as Jurisprudential Method, (14 women’s Rights law Reporter, 1992) p.3).
Therefore the world of representation must not be abandoned for the meta-physical world, but the two are essential to one another. A way to deal with this could be grounding the lyrical content of my musical project in the world of representation. This can be used as a place for human experience to be taken account of, or at least an artistic interpretation of this. The music itself, lying underneath the words, is metaphysical unification. Thinking about music, and what it can do, is the perfect place to re-engage with metaphysical ideas. The music acts as an underlying ‘Will’ that unites these perspectives together, while also containing a form of sensual energy; taking the witness like testimonies beyond their place in the phenomenal world, uniting them in a sensual truth with harmony, rhythm and melody. As an emotive witness testimony, I see none more persuasive than music. This use of music can work as a rebellion outside the world of the Mass-Market, but while also using lyrical content to explore people’s lives in that world. Schopenhauer’s idea of Will that unites all, and takes us, although Schopenhauer would have used its purpose differently, away from mass individualization in the marketplace. It is ideas like the will, even the soul in philosophies like Hegel’s, that can reveal the unanimity of being. ‘The will, as the thing-in-itself, constitutes the inner, true, and indestructible nature of man.’ (Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Volume 2 [New York, Dover, 2016] p.201) Obviously, the language is somewhat dated, and replacing ‘man’ with ‘human’, makes the quote apt for the twenty-first century. The ‘Will’ as Schopenhauer says, exists beyond human intellect, and unites humans with each other, and with their own history, as something that has always existed through time. Schopenhauer sees the Will and music as directly connected: ‘music does not, like all other arts, exhibit the idea or grades of the Will’s objectification, but directly the will itself’ (Schopenhauer, p.448). The music reveals ‘secret information on the feelings expressed in the words’. This makes The Will key to understanding
Composing the North East 