Rachel Elliott is a faculty member at CUNY College of Staten Island has been Visiting Researcher at the University of Exeter. From 2020-2022 she worked as an Assistant Professor at Brandon University (term position). She received her PhD in Philosophy from the University of Guelph in 2019. Her research investigates music’s transformative potential using Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of embodiment. Rachel wrote and hosted an academic podcast about improvised music called 'Sound It Out.' She had done previous work in philosophy at McGill University (B.A.Hons.) and the University of Toronto (M.A.). Prior to undertaking her doctoral studies, Rachel taught in the Humanities Department of Montreal's Dawson College.
One way that we connect with others in we-experience comes through sharing time. However, questio... more One way that we connect with others in we-experience comes through sharing time. However, questions have been raised as to whether time can be shared between normates and misfits. In this paper, I illustrate the concept of sharing time across bodily difference using Merleau-Ponty’s concept of body schematic temporality from the Phenomenology of Perception ([1945] 1962). I explore how we-experiences can be fostered through shared time across bodily difference in two contexts: becoming ill and playing music.
Ambiguity in our experience of embodiment online has prevented us from confidently extending exis... more Ambiguity in our experience of embodiment online has prevented us from confidently extending existing scholarship to the domain of online sociality. In recent decades, research across the disciplines has been undergirded by themes related to embodiment, restoring to prominence a theme previously neglected in part thanks to the rise of feminist scholars within the academy. We have not, however, adequately appealed to this corpus when theorizing forms of life happening online. In this paper I hope to bridge this gap by bringing forward phenomenological evidence about the nature of online embodiment. This paper presents the findings from a research project that used phenomenological interviews to elicit descriptions of lived embodiment from participants singing in online choirs during the COVID-19 pandemic. I argue that these descriptions reveal anchoring and discounting as central features of their experience, two dynamics of the body schema as described by Merleau-Ponty in the Phenomenology of Perception that underpin participant experiences of sensory disjunction. I furthermore take pains to show how the form of embodiment operative in the online choirs has the characteristics of intercorporeality, a reciprocal two-sided form of embodied subjectivity. After explaining how Husserl and Merleau-Ponty each define intercorporeality, I suggest that what I am calling an auditory intercorporeality underlies reported features of participant experience in the choirs, such as we-experience and coordination.
Music is a vital means of engaging with affect, one that many of us are relying upon to process t... more Music is a vital means of engaging with affect, one that many of us are relying upon to process the unthinkable political realities that confront us. However, insofar as we are doing this serially-for instance, listening alone to pre-recorded music on demand-we are missing out on a critical potential of such affective musical engagement. Jean-Paul Sartre identified seriality as a social formation marked by alterity, one that prevents mutual awareness of similar situatedness. However, whereas Sartre argued that broadcast radio possesses a serial structure, this article argues that it can engender an incipient form of collective, which Sartre calls the group-en-fusion. This argument is made through the example of The Stillness and the Dancing , Joel Cuthbert's campus and community radio program that plays ambient, experimental, and contemporary classical music on CFRU Radio Gryphon in Guelph, Ontario.
Critical Studiesin Improvisation / Études critiques en improvisation, 2018
There is increasing appreciation for the role that location plays in the experience of a musical ... more There is increasing appreciation for the role that location plays in the experience of a musical event. This paper seeks to understand that role in terms of our habitual relationships to place. I ask how being musical somewhere can expand and transform our habituated comportment there, an inquiry sparked by the theory and practice of the late experimental music pioneer Pauline Oliveros. Grounded in Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of embodiment, I argue that the site-specific improvised performances of Jen Reimer and Max Stein invite audiences into transformed relationships with places they habitually encounter. With sustained comparisons to the centrality of deep listening in Pauline Oliveros's lifetime of sonic innovation, and frequent reference to Alia Al-Saji's reception of Merleau-Ponty's account of the habit body, this paper contends that such site-specific improvised performances can elicit a sort of hesitation in our everyday style of sensory-motor conditioning, and, concomitantly, awaken a layer of sensory living amenable to radically new sonic and behavioural configurations.
This paper takes the events surrounding the Mandela memorial as an invitation to think through th... more This paper takes the events surrounding the Mandela memorial as an invitation to think through the role of “meaningless gestures” in the significatory process through close readings of Derrida’s Speech and Phenomena (1973) and Husserl’s Logical Investigations (1914).
One way that we connect with others in we-experience comes through sharing time. However, questio... more One way that we connect with others in we-experience comes through sharing time. However, questions have been raised as to whether time can be shared between normates and misfits. In this paper, I illustrate the concept of sharing time across bodily difference using Merleau-Ponty’s concept of body schematic temporality from the Phenomenology of Perception ([1945] 1962). I explore how we-experiences can be fostered through shared time across bodily difference in two contexts: becoming ill and playing music.
Ambiguity in our experience of embodiment online has prevented us from confidently extending exis... more Ambiguity in our experience of embodiment online has prevented us from confidently extending existing scholarship to the domain of online sociality. In recent decades, research across the disciplines has been undergirded by themes related to embodiment, restoring to prominence a theme previously neglected in part thanks to the rise of feminist scholars within the academy. We have not, however, adequately appealed to this corpus when theorizing forms of life happening online. In this paper I hope to bridge this gap by bringing forward phenomenological evidence about the nature of online embodiment. This paper presents the findings from a research project that used phenomenological interviews to elicit descriptions of lived embodiment from participants singing in online choirs during the COVID-19 pandemic. I argue that these descriptions reveal anchoring and discounting as central features of their experience, two dynamics of the body schema as described by Merleau-Ponty in the Phenomenology of Perception that underpin participant experiences of sensory disjunction. I furthermore take pains to show how the form of embodiment operative in the online choirs has the characteristics of intercorporeality, a reciprocal two-sided form of embodied subjectivity. After explaining how Husserl and Merleau-Ponty each define intercorporeality, I suggest that what I am calling an auditory intercorporeality underlies reported features of participant experience in the choirs, such as we-experience and coordination.
Music is a vital means of engaging with affect, one that many of us are relying upon to process t... more Music is a vital means of engaging with affect, one that many of us are relying upon to process the unthinkable political realities that confront us. However, insofar as we are doing this serially-for instance, listening alone to pre-recorded music on demand-we are missing out on a critical potential of such affective musical engagement. Jean-Paul Sartre identified seriality as a social formation marked by alterity, one that prevents mutual awareness of similar situatedness. However, whereas Sartre argued that broadcast radio possesses a serial structure, this article argues that it can engender an incipient form of collective, which Sartre calls the group-en-fusion. This argument is made through the example of The Stillness and the Dancing , Joel Cuthbert's campus and community radio program that plays ambient, experimental, and contemporary classical music on CFRU Radio Gryphon in Guelph, Ontario.
Critical Studiesin Improvisation / Études critiques en improvisation, 2018
There is increasing appreciation for the role that location plays in the experience of a musical ... more There is increasing appreciation for the role that location plays in the experience of a musical event. This paper seeks to understand that role in terms of our habitual relationships to place. I ask how being musical somewhere can expand and transform our habituated comportment there, an inquiry sparked by the theory and practice of the late experimental music pioneer Pauline Oliveros. Grounded in Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of embodiment, I argue that the site-specific improvised performances of Jen Reimer and Max Stein invite audiences into transformed relationships with places they habitually encounter. With sustained comparisons to the centrality of deep listening in Pauline Oliveros's lifetime of sonic innovation, and frequent reference to Alia Al-Saji's reception of Merleau-Ponty's account of the habit body, this paper contends that such site-specific improvised performances can elicit a sort of hesitation in our everyday style of sensory-motor conditioning, and, concomitantly, awaken a layer of sensory living amenable to radically new sonic and behavioural configurations.
This paper takes the events surrounding the Mandela memorial as an invitation to think through th... more This paper takes the events surrounding the Mandela memorial as an invitation to think through the role of “meaningless gestures” in the significatory process through close readings of Derrida’s Speech and Phenomena (1973) and Husserl’s Logical Investigations (1914).
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