Sixteenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

Mythologemes that mask the significance and value of ancient and vestigial figures runs analogous to the contemporary abject labour value of composers. Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer project offers a strategy to recover many lost semantics of sacrifice and the sacred which in turn offers hermeneutic insight into the comparable loss of understanding of composer function and value. Like the homo sacer and its mirror the sovereign, the composer can be easily positioned as a figure of exception, simultaneously inside and outside labour models. By bringing focussed analysis to the social archaeology that binds composers to these ancient figures of the beyond, and blinds societal understanding of composer labour value, useful tools emerge for marginalised practitioners to reclaim, or at least reposition themselves, as valued primary producers. Transhistorical awareness offers living composers an opportunity to rhetorically address the tangible impacts and stresses that play out on the cultural and political dimensions of their working lives and offer them pathways beyond the ‘bare life’ they are currently afforded.