ABSTRACT:This article explores how Venezuelan musicians experience and speak about music's "ineffability," frequently contrasting it with the linguistically fixed state discourses about music. I approach this topic through my ethnographic work on El Sistema, a state-funded program that provides free classical music education and instruments to 900,000 young people across Venezuela. Studying the ways in which El Sistema participants experience and discuss ineffability in music captures the unpredictable, unruly, multiple, and contradictory dimensions of how they inhabit state power. Using a combined phenomenological and discursive approach, I think of music practice as simultaneously the locus of state and symbolic power, and a social experience that transcends and escapes it. I trace how young musicians appeal to the ineffability of music to make sense of their own experiences as barrio (popular sector) residents who are suspended in the cracks of polarized discourses and in the double bind of state power and its opposition. I read young musicians' determination to experience music as ineffable, or detached from the political context, as a medium for confronting the dilemma of being simultaneously dependent on and critical of a state that aims to defend their interests. In summoning musicians' verbal testimonies of music and the concepts that emerge from them as a key to understanding experiences that are thought to be ineffable, I respond to recent calls to articulate a more nuanced place for language in studies of affect and embodiment.

中文翻译：

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跳舞的能量：委内瑞拉的音乐、难以言喻的国家权力

摘要：本文探讨了委内瑞拉音乐家如何体验和谈论音乐的“不可言说”，并经常将其与语言固定的关于音乐的国家话语进行对比。我通过我在 El Sistema 上的民族志工作来探讨这个话题，El Sistema 是一个国家资助的计划，为委内瑞拉 900,000 名年轻人提供免费的古典音乐教育和乐器。研究 El Sistema 参与者在音乐中体验和讨论不可言喻的方式，抓住了他们如何掌握国家权力的不可预测、不守规矩、多重和矛盾的维度。使用现象学和话语相结合的方法，我认为音乐实践既是国家和象征权力的所在地，也是一种超越和逃避它的社会体验。我追溯了年轻音乐家如何诉诸于音乐的不可言说，以理解他们作为巴里奥（流行部门）居民的经历，他们被悬浮在两极分化的话语裂缝中，处于国家权力及其反对的双重束缚中。我读到年轻音乐家决心将音乐体验为不可言喻的，或与政治背景分离的，作为一种媒介来应对同时依赖和批评旨在捍卫他们利益的国家的困境。在召唤音乐家对音乐的口头见证以及从中出现的概念作为理解被认为无法形容的体验的关键时，我回应了最近的呼吁，即在情感和体现的研究中阐明语言的更细微的位置。