129 http://www.univie.ac.at/constructivism/journal/8/1/129.matyja Enactive Cognitive Science Me, Music, and I: Embodied and Enactive Cognition meets Music Jakub Ryszard Matyja • Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw • jrmatyja/at/gmail.com > Upshot • The fact that both “consciousness” and “music” are quite elu- sive terms makes the attempt to explain the nature (or even the existence of) “musical consciousness” a compelling quest. The papers in this book tackle these problems in an engaging way, ranging from sociology of mu- sic to drug altered music cognition. Some also apply enactive and ecologi- cal approaches to music cognition, which makes the book an interesting read for constructivists. D avid & Eric Clarke’s Music and Consciousness: Philosophical, Psycho- logical, and Cultural Perspectives is a broad publication addressing scholars interested in each of the research ields mentioned in the book’s title. Consisting of twenty well- crated chapters, the book draws heavily on the embodied approaches to consciousness, including a chapter on enactivism. What are the possible relationships between music and consciousness? In the preface chapter of the book, its editors point out just a few: the mere similarity based on the observation that both of music and consciousness combine social, conceptual, technical, emotional, perceptual, and motor attributes (xix); and, more importantly, the fact that as music has the capacity to both re- lect human subjectivity and be the power- ful element responsible for constituting this subjectivity, it thus can ofer us important insights into consciousness (xx). he open- ing chapter of the book, “Music, Phenom- enology, and Time Consciousness” by David Clarke ofers the reader insight into the im- portance of Edmund Husserl in his studies on both music (further developed, as the author reminds us, by scholars such as Jason Brown and commented on by Jacques Der- rida) and time consciousness. Interestingly enough, Husserl (and his ideas) returns in almost half of the papers included in the book. David Clarke’s chapter is followed by Eugene Montague’s paper, which aims to compare the famous “hard problem” of con- sciousness (as argued by philosophers such as David Chalmers) with a similar issue in musical research, namely “the incorporation of subjective experience within an objective explanatory framework” (29). Furthermore, and perhaps interestingly for constructiv- ists, Montague argues that: “ musicology would do well to revisit theoretical perspectives that reject a fundamental opposition between objective and subjective, such as the (Eu- ropean) Continental tradition of phenomenol- ogy, since such perspectives have proved useful in meeting challenges posed in the study of con- sciousness. ” (29) Montague returns to Husserl’s analy- sis of time consciousness, aiming to use it to understand the objectivity of a musical piece through the subjective experience of the body, while acknowledging the impor- tant insights of Antonio Damasio in this re- search area (for accounts of embodied music cognition see, for instance, Leman 2008). In the subsequent chapter, Michael Gal- lope ofers a Derrida-inspired deconstruc- tivist approach to the phenomenology of consciousness, leading him to skepticism about musical experience and the very exis- tence of musical objects as such. In a similar fashion, while referring to French philoso- pher Jacques Lacan’s thought and that of other philosophers interested in psycho- analysis, Ian Biddle explores the topic (and models) of musical listening in everyday lives. he ith chapter of the book – Bennett Hogg’s “Enactive consciousness, intertex- tuality, and musical free improvisation: de- constructing mythologies and inding con- nections” may be of direct interest to the constructivist community. his is because Hogg draws on the classical work by Fran- cisco Varela, Evan hompson, and Eleanor Rosch, he Embodied Mind, especially the connection between: “ …the idea of consciousness understood as enactive cognition and the perceptions within philosophy that knowledge depends on being in a world that is inseparable from our bodies, our language, and our social history – in short, from our embodiment. ” (Varela, hompson & Rosch, 1993: 149) Hogg discusses the connection between such an understanding of consciousness and a speculative and speciically musical/sonic Review of Music and Consciousness: Philosophical, Psychological, and Cultural Perspectives edited by David and Erik Clarke. Oxford University Press, New York, 2011. ISBN 978-0199553792 · 380 pages