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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 June 2025
Methods of critique fashion their possible outcomes. Rita Felski (2015) makes the case for ‘postcritique’, a method of reading in which texts are worked with, understood in their own right, such that a more diverse range of styles and arguments might be understood. Robert T. Tally Jr. (2022) rejects this method, contending that postcritique claims to serve the text under analysis but, in adopting a standpoint of placid agreement, facilitates a mode of reading that diminishes the potency of the text itself and critical dialogue more generally. This article argues that postcritique has dominated the discourse surrounding ‘The New Discipline’, a manifesto of sorts written by composer Jennifer Walshe. The article offers an alternative critical reading of ‘The New Discipline’, arguing that the text is itself a Jennifer Walshe piece. The composer performs the role of a musicologist who falsely declares newness, inconsistently includes and excludes artists, and deploys a vague, if not contradictory, definition of bodies. The manifesto is addressed to an undisclosed but seemingly specific audience. I argue that these apparent shortcomings evoke themes of performance, irony and fictionalisation that are found elsewhere in Walshe’s work and make such a reading licit.
1 Jennifer Walshe, ‘The New Discipline’, Milker Corporation https://milker.org/the-new-discipline (accessed 4 February 2025).
2 More recently, Walshe’s practice has extensively explored AI but had not by 2016, hence its omission here.
3 Jennifer Walshe, ‘XXX_LIVE_NUDE_GIRLS!!!’, Parse 15, no. 1 (Autumn 2022) https://parsejournal.com/article/xxx_live_nude_girls/ (accessed 17 February 2025), paras. 34–35.
4 Jennifer Walshe, ‘An Introduction to Grúpat’, Milker Corporation https://milker.org/anintroductiontogrupat (accessed 17 February 2025).
5 ‘Disclaimer’, Aisteach https://www.aisteach.org/?page_id=306 (accessed 25 February 2025). The URL that Walshe gives through her own website is inactive at the time of writing: aisteach.net
6 Walshe, ‘The New Discipline’, paragraph 3.
7 See ‘MusikTexte 149 – Mai 2016’, MusikTexte: Zeitschrift für Neue Musik, https://musiktexte.de/MusikTexte-149/en (accessed 4 February 2025).
8 Josh Spear, ‘The New Discipline’, in Composing Together and Not Together – Intimacy as a Condition for Collaboration, Norwegian Academy of Music, 7 (2022) https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/1377266/1386400/0/0 (accessed 4 February 2025), para. 3.
9 Ibid., para. 20.
10 Marko Ciciliani, ‘Music in the Expanded Field: On Recent Approaches to Interdisciplinary Composition’, in Darmstädter Beiträge zur Neuen Musik, Band 24, ed. by Michael Rebhan and Thomas Schäfer (Mainz: Schott Verlag, 2016), pp. 23–35 (p. 24).
11 Ibid.
12 Monika Voithofer, ‘“That it’s not too late for us to have bodies”’: Notes on Extended Performance Practices in Contemporary Music’, Music and Practice, 6 (2020), pp. 1–13 (2)
13 Ibid., p. 9.
14 Sanne Krogh Groth, ‘Composers on Stage: Ambiguous Authorship in Contemporary Music Performance’, Contemporary Music Review 35, no. 6 (2016), pp. 686–705 (687; 694).
15 Ibid., p. 703.
16 Spear claims to discuss the text’s shortcomings, but it is unclear what these are, hence their omission here.
17 Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), p. 5.
18 Ibid., p. 1; p. 3.
19 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 130.
20 Felski, op. cit., p. 154; p. 173.
21 Robert T. Tally Jr., For a Ruthless Critique of All That Exists: Literature in an Age of Capitalist Realism (Winchester: Zero Books, 2022), p. 6.
22 Ibid., p. 38.
23 Ibid., p. 7; pp. 38–39.
24 Sedgwick, pp. 130–131.
25 Tally, op. cit., p. 3.
26 Robert Scott, ‘Postcritique; or, The Cultural Logic of Capitalist Realism’, Los Angeles Review of Books, 14 September 2022 https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/postcritique-or-the-cultural-logic-of-capitalist-realism/ (accessed 13 February 2025), para. 11. In the fourth chapter of his book Reading Hegel, ‘Après la Lettre: Hegel in a Postcritical Era’, Scott develops a substantial criticism of postcritique through the philosophies of Hegel and Gillian Rose, while also developing a different model of reading which is critical but without pretensions of mastery or detachment. See Robert Lucas Scott, Reading Hegel: Irony Recollection Critique (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2025), pp. 121–165.
27 Tally, op. cit., pp. 38–39.
28 Elin Diamond, ‘The Violence of “We”: Politicizing Identification’, in Critical Theory and Performance, ed. Janelle G. Reinelt and Joseph R. Roach (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2007 [1992]) pp. 403–412 (407).
29 Felski, op. cit., p. 5.
30 I wonder what a postcritical reading of postcritique might look like, and what would happen if that line of inquiry were continued time and time again.
31 A more recent and relevant example might Cat Hope and Louise Devenish’s ‘The New Virtuosity’. It has not been cited here as it was published in 2020, therefore after Walshe would have written ‘The New Discipline’.
32 Paul Bekker, ‘Neue Musik’, Tribüne der Kunst und Zeit: Eine Schrifttensammlung, ed. byKasimir Edschmid (Berlin: Erich Reiß Verlag, 1920), pp. 7–80 (7–9).
33 Ibid. [my translation], p. 80.
34 Richard Toop, ‘Four Facets of The New Complexity’, Contact, 32 (1988), pp. 6–8.
35 Ibid., p. 5.
36 ‘Neue Einfachheit’, SWR Kultur, 23 June 2009, https://www.swr.de/swrkultur/programm/article-swr-11824.html (accessed 26 February 2025), para. 1.
37 Aribert Reimann, ‘Salut für die junge Avantgard’, Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 1 (1979), p. 25. Christopher Fox, ‘Neue Einfachheit’, Grove Music Online, 20 January 2001 (accessed 18 February 2025).
38 Walshe, ‘The New Discipline’, paragraph 4.
39 Spear, ‘The New Discipline’, para. 10.
40 I initially believed Spear and did not check Cook’s text. As a result my article about ‘The New Discipline’ for Positionen makes the same assertion about the origins of ‘The New Discipline’: I was wrong. Spear’s adoption of postcritique has created a scenario in which I cannot straightforwardly believe published doctoral research, it seems.
41 Nicholas Cook, Beyond the Score: Music as Performance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 25.
42 Nicholas Cook, ‘Between Art and Science: Music as Performance’, Journal of the British Academy 2 (2014), p. 6.
43 Ibid., p. 7.
44 Tally, op. cit., p. 6.
45 Walshe, ‘The New Discipline’, paragraph 5.
46 Walshe, ‘The New Discipline’, paragraph 12 of the section ‘Links to Articles, Books, and Translations (Norwegian, German, Polish, Spanish, Korean)’.
47 Ibid., paragraphs 2–3.
48 ‘Richard Barrett’, Elision https://www.elision.org.au/soundhouse/richard-barrett/ (accessed 25 February 2025); ‘Richard Barrett, Elision, Opening of The Mouth’, Discogs https://www.discogs.com/release/1194062-Richard-Barrett-Elision-Opening-Of-The-Mouth?srsltid=AfmBOooEyHMsVaL-LvYx7zP9n_v2-6Owr5yOjyGiyilziqlGQvlhIlew (accessed 25 February 2025).
49 ‘Audio’, Steven Takasugi http://www.steventakasugi.com/audio.html (accessed 25 February 2025).
50 ‘About’, Object Collection https://objectcollection.us/about/ (accessed 24 February 2025).
51 Walshe, ‘The New Discipline’, para. 3. Allan F. Moore, ‘Categorical Conventions in Music Discourse: Style and Genre’, Music & Letters 82, no. 3 (August, 2001), 432–442 (441).
52 Walshe, ‘The New Discipline’, paragraph 3.
53 Ibid., paragraph 1.
54 Ibid., paragraph 6.
55 Bethany Younge, ‘Seeing and Hearing Disability in Maurico Kagel’s Repertoire from Staatstheater’, Tempo 75, no. 296 (April 2021), pp. 7–20 (9; 18).
56 Jennifer Walshe, ‘A Late Anthology of Early Music, Vol. 1: Ancient to Renaissance’, Milker Corporation https://milker.org/a-late-anthology (accessed 21 February 2025); Jennifer Walshe, A Late Anthology of Early Music, Vol. 1: Ancient to Renaissance (Tetbind Records/Jennifer Walshe: 2020); Jennifer Walshe, ‘13 Ways of Looking at AI, Art & Music’, Unsound Festival, 15 December 2023 https://unsoundfestival.substack.com/p/unsound-dispatch-13-ways-of-looking (accessed 21 February 2025).
57 Walshe, ‘The New Discipline’, paragraph 6.
58 ‘Stewart Lee and Top Gear’, YouTube, 6 February 2011 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7CnMQ4L9Pc&ab_channel=richardc1975, 13:09–14:00 (accessed 25 February 2025).
59 Walshe, ‘The New Discipline’, under ‘Background’.
60 Richard Maxwell, Theater for Beginners (New York, NY: Theater Communications Group, 2015), p. 9.