Introduction: Philosophical and Political Challenges of a Material Approach to Instrumentality
It is becoming increasingly acknowledged that the political dimensions of material philosophy cannot be separated from the consideration of material as a thing in itself. For artists who work with materials in one way or another, this makes the political an active part of their practice, beyond an interpretative framework or context. In music, a clear application of such considerations is to explore beyond the sounds one makes and hears, and their structures, to the instruments and methods used to sound them. This is the approach I take in this essay, which comprises a video dialogue and a critical introduction. I have conducted interviews with two artist-instrument-makers, Khabat Abas and Sam Underwood. I selected these artists because I find their work aesthetically appealing, powerfully and directly communicative, and also because both artists prioritize working in an acoustic context (even if sometimes using amplification). Such an approach is less common than that of using digital means to create new instruments and interfaces for music performance.
I discuss the political-material intersection of instrument making as a creative practice, considering how this might be explicitly externalized (as in the case of Khabat Abas) or treated as a foundational principle for practice (as in the case of Sam Underwood). I consider what these ideas might contribute to a discussion of speculative realism in the area of material practices of organology. In so doing, I respond to the challenge set by music philosopher Iain Campbell who suggests that “the constitution of problems must be understood as a creative and critical procedure” (Campbell 2021: 420). By establishing these questions in relation to the artistic work itself alongside a philosophical enquiry into its context, the opportunity is created for artistic work to critically engage with philosophy as well as the other way around, so new meanings in both artistic practice and aesthetics can emerge. In the case of the work of the two artists I have interviewed, I consider their creative work, as well as their statements about it, as philosophical propositions – in the form of practice research – that contribute fruitfully to this debate.
Art theorist and curator Nicolas Bourriaud considers the material nature of artworks as urgent, when describing the concurrence of the climate crisis with a global cultural crisis in the book Inclusions: Aesthetics of the Capitalocene. He states that “nature produces neither waste nor works of art” (Bourriaud 2021: 5). Bourriaud links the creation of waste by private property with a concurrent inaccessibility of culture. In a previous book, The Exform, he defined waste as “the site where border negotiations unfold between what is rejected and what is admitted, products and waste” (Bourriaud 2016: 10). Waste therefore contains anything not currently at work in capitalism and creates “an authentically organic link between the aesthetic and the political” (Bourriaud 2016: 10). Thus, in the contemporary moment, “waste, what the process of production leaves behind, has assumed a preponderant position in politics, economy and culture” (Bourriaud 2016: 97).
He proposes solutions to this problem, arguing for “an inclusive aesthetics that calls for a training of the gaze, decentered – at last, relocated within a plurivocal universe that includes nonhumans” (Bourriaud 2021: 11). The implication of a non-anthropocentric view of art and art practice clearly resonates with many of the posthuman positions that are taken in what has come to be known as new materialism. Rooted in the discipline of visual art, Bourriaud’s approach invites reflection on how it might be applied to a musical or sonic sphere. Perhaps the training of the “listening gaze” could be scrutinized: how, and to what, do we listen, and what does it mean to attend to sound in an instrumental/organological context?
Bourriaud suggests that “to oppose a system, one must first conceive its nature as precarious” (Bourriaud 2016: 97, original emphasis); it is therefore necessary to ask whether the system of conceiving, designing, building, and using instruments can be made precarious. If so, Bourriaud states that “this aesthetics could validate the end of the dyads that structure predatory western thought and aim to completely dissolve them” (Bourriaud 2021: 12).[1] The system of instrument building is therefore not necessarily opposed but revealed as one that comprises and creates hierarchies within social and musical systems. When this system becomes precarious, new musical and social relationships can be proposed. A corollary of this might be indeterminacy: while known instrumental systems produce – for the most part – known results, new systems may require a reliance on the unknown in order to traverse new organological and sonic territories.
A recent discussion of the materiality of instruments that explores similar territory to this essay can be found in Kevin Toksöz Fairbairn’s book dis/cord: Thinking Sound Through Agential Realism. He posits the materiality and agency of instruments as an area overlooked in musical-philosophical discussion, writing that “instruments only breach the surface of musicological discourse in these moments of exception, and even then only as muses to a larger creative vision, that merely underscores their otherwise irrelevance” (Toksöz Fairbairn 2022: 30). For Toksöz Fairbairn, the linear aspects of the work concept (see Goehr 1994) in Western Art Music are maintained when “the musical instrument is an afterthought to composition,” whereas “the moment that decisions in instrument construction are acknowledged as elements of the creative process […] this linearity collapses” (Toksöz Fairbairn 2022: 30). The effect of this collapse is to de-hierarchize and destabilize the relationships between composer, performer/interpreter, and listener that are otherwise at work in the work concept. In Toksöz Fairbairn’s examples, and in mine, indeterminacy inherent in instrumental systems produces new methods of thinking sonically and materially. As such, other meanings and relationships are proposed and explored.
Toksöz Fairbairn uses Karen Barad’s (2007) concept of intra-action to describe the various considerations invited by a material approach to instruments as “an immersive entanglement of agencies” (Toksöz Fairbairn 2022: 31). As I concluded when asking how Bourriaud’s comments might apply to music, Toksöz Fairbairn also concludes that the answer lies within a way of listening. In relation to his own creative practice, he states that “the instrument building that precedes and succeeds each performance is another form of listening” (Toksöz Fairbairn 2022: 116). Instead of drawing upon the notion of precarity, he describes this as a form of dis/continuity:
The inversions and reversions of performative listening and acting are dis/continuous; the entanglement of apparatuses in the sounds they make and observe are dis/continuous; the blossoming of sounds from instrument-building and of instrument-building from sound are dis/continuous. (Toksöz Fairbairn 2022: 134)
While both Bourriaud and Toksöz Fairbairn draw on ideas from various material philosophies, they do not articulate what could be understood as the extreme position of the speculative realist approach to materialism, although Bourriaud is more explicit than Toksöz Fairbairn in his articulation of a de-centered humanism as opposed to a posthuman ontology of material (since objects are conceived as part of his “plurivocal universe” as opposed to primarily conceived in their material relations, as for Toksöz Fairbairn).
I also do not accept a flat ontology where all objects are equal in their subjectivity and ontological status, including even those objects that are imagined. For example, in philosopher Graham Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology, “objects confront one another only by proxy, through sensual profiles found only on the interior of some other entity” (Harman 2007: 200). Even though Harman’s turn to aesthetics as “first philosophy” (Harman 2007: 221)[2] is itself appealing, the statement that “relations between all real objects, including mindless chunks of dirt, occur only by means of some form of allusion” (Harman 2007: 221) poses obvious problems from a political and ethical standpoint. Such a philosophy upholds the subjectivity of even imaginary objects, while the subjectivity of living individuals is denied or undermined in ongoing acts of oppression. Where the former might be characterized as abstract while the latter is social or concrete, material realities might be considered a continuum within a philosophical paradigm: what dictates relationships between speculative objects must also apply to material relationships between people in the world. Therefore, as part of this discussion, I have undertaken interviews that offer insight into the ways that sound can also be an act of resistance and a means of proposing new realities. This is only the case, however, if phenomenological experiences are considered real and not merely imagined or placed alongside imagined experiences.
Philosopher Robin James has criticized such new materialist theories from a related, and feminist, standpoint. Following Simone de Beauvoir, she suggests that “material-historical situations mean that some actants make more of a difference than others” (James 2014, original emphasis). She questions whether a new materialist approach can be thought of as a kind of Ideal Theory, stating that,
in new materialism, ‘resonance’ functions analogously to neoliberal models of the marked and biopolitical concepts of life, which like idealized models put everyone on the same continuity and thus abstract away from the very social discontinuities they produce. (James 2019: 109)[3]
Rather, James points out that, “[n]ot everything has […] a legible effect” and that, “[o]ntologically flattening differences in a politically non-flat context naturalizes the political non-flatness” (James 2014). Considering responses to such a position, she states that “it would be better to think about idealizing and non-idealizing abstractions” and that “[w]hat we need are non-ideal accounts of sound and sonic materiality” (James 2018). For James, such non-ideal accounts would not only turn to theories and practices that fall broadly within Western art and music contexts. So, in addition to the precarious or dis/continuous, I might also look to the non-ideal as something that can disrupt the concepts of material, sound, and listening in material practices of working with instruments.
Building on James’s statement that “sound never overcomes, fixes, avoids or pre-empts power relations” (James 2019: 183), in my analysis sonic and material properties are considered alongside, but not prior to, phenomenological experiences. Social and musical experiences that are intersubjective are not assumed to be alongside interobjective relationships or equal to them. Contrary to Harman, I consider aesthetics to always be intersubjective; therefore, any relations that identify a musical or social reality over a material frequency (or “resonance”) are aesthetic. I do not propose that there is a realness about the world that is separate from these experiences. Rather, phenomenological experiences cannot be simply placed alongside interobjective experiences. Following Sara Ahmed’s statement that “[t]he starting point for orientation is the point from which the world unfolds: the ‘here’ of the body and the ‘where’ of its dwelling” (Ahmed 2006: 8), I separate the sounding of material properties from the description of intersubjective material-semiotic relationships. Yet, I also consider how the former provides a meaningful philosophical insight into the latter.[4]