Ontology, Agency, Creativity
It seems that we all have our own Alfred Gell – that he is a multiplicity; and that Art and Agency is a multiplicity, as well as being a technology of enchantment (Gell 1992). From the evidence of the conference that forms the basis for the present volume, Gell left a trail of dyadic relations of attentive intellectual engagement, of honest and kind exchange. What is striking – from the diverse readings and indebted critiques manifest at the conference – is the extraordinarily fertile nature of his work. Cultural objects and artistic oeuvres, as he said, ‘have indeed no essences, only an indefinite range of potentials’ (1999: 212). He concludes in ‘Vogel’s Net’: ‘I would define as a candidate artwork any object or performance that . . . embodies intentionalities that are complex, demanding of attention and perhaps difficult to reconstruct fully’ (ibid.: 211), while also being ‘a place of capture’ or a ‘thought-trap’ (in Boyer’s words), which holds its ‘victims’ for a time in suspension (ibid.: 213). Surely we are all, in this volume, struggling generatively to be released from capture by Art and Agency.
Music: always the exception, on the outside looking in, in discussions of material culture. Against this, I will propose that music is a particularly instructive object for a Gell-ian theory of cultural production, as well as being productive in relation to the concern with ontology in recent social and anthropological theory (Henare, Holbraad and Wastell 2007; Viveiros de Castro 2003, 2004). In what follows I develop an analytics of music’s mediation, relating this to recent attempts to theorize music’s plural ontologies. But before this, I recapitulate some key principles from Art and Agency, and then go on to note some telling problems with Gell’s theory. The problems become particularly apparent when examining music through the lens of Art and Agency, but are not confined to the study of music. Such limitations are perplexing in that most of them appear to have been avoided in Gell’s earlier essay ‘The Network of Standard Stoppages’, published for the first time in this collection, which amounts to a preparatory study towards Chapter 9 of the eventual book. The earlier essay foresees directions of analysis that were not pursued in Art and Agency, evidencing in this way a discontinuity in Gell’s oeuvre, and one that demonstrates the Gellian insight (adapted from Husserl) that not all that is protended is necessarily retained.
Gell begins Art and Agency by distinguishing his anthropological theory of art from a sociological one, as well as from any ‘institutional theory’ of art, such as that of Bourdieu. This is an insistent theme of his essays on art; indeed Gell etches the boundaries of his approach through a double distinction. He will break not only with the institutional focus of the sociology of art, which has concerned itself primarily with Western art or the art of advanced states, but also ‘with the aesthetic preoccupations of much of the existing anthropology of art’, adopting a ‘methodological philistinism’ (Gell 1999: 162, 161). A properly anthropological theory of art, in his eyes, will be social in orientation, not aesthetic, semiotic or cultural. Its focus should be ‘social relations in the vicinity of objects mediating social agency’, such that ‘the nature of the art object is a function of the social-relational matrix in which it is embedded’ (Gell 1998: 7). Moreover the production and circulation of art should be understood as sustained by objective social processes, in turn connected to other social processes – exchange, religion, kinship, politics and so on (ibid.: 3). ‘Instead of symbolic communication’, Gell writes,
I place all the emphasis on agency, intention, causation, result and transformation. I view art as a system of action, intended to change the world . . . The ‘action’-centred approach to art is inherently more anthropological than the alternative semiotic approach because it is preoccupied with the practical mediatory role of art objects in the social process, rather than with the interpretation of objects ‘as if’ they were texts. (ibid.: 6; italics in original)
A strictly social, rather than linguistic, discursive or cultural conception of mediation, is therefore at the heart of Gell’s approach.
Also definitive of an anthropological theory of art, Gell writes, is the conviction that such a theory should adopt a particular ‘depth of focus’, one that is ‘biographical’ and that ‘attempts to replicate the time perspective of [the social] agents themselves’ (ibid.: 10), a perspective the periodicity of which is the life cycle. This biographical depth of focus has temporal and spatial correlates; it examines time and space as they are ‘traversed by agents’ (ibid.: 11) over the life course.
At the centre of an anthropological theory of art, according to Gell, lies a nexus of social relations, ‘a domain in which “objects” merge with “people” by virtue of the existence of social relations between persons and things, and persons and persons via things’ (ibid.: 12). These relations are ‘art-like’; they exist when an art object in the form of a material index elicits a certain cognitive operation, which Gell defines, after Peirce, as the ‘abduction’ of social agency: the inference that the object is the outcome of social agency (ibid.: 13–15). In this way the cultural objects (or indexes) that result from social agency both condense social relations and themselves have agency. Gell distinguishes between primary agents, intentional beings who distribute their agency through indexes or material objects, and secondary agents, the index or artefact through which the primary agents distribute their agency (ibid.: 20). Thus ‘objectification in artefact-form is how social agency manifests and realizes itself, via the proliferation of fragments of “primary” intentional agents in their “secondary” artefactual forms’ (ibid.: 21).
In sum, all cultural production constructs social relations between persons, relations that are relayed via art or cultural objects, and between persons and objects. Through the circulation of such objects, social relations are distributed and dispersed both spatially and temporally. Reflecting on the agency of Congolese nail fetishes, Gell describes the resulting effect as ‘an invisible skein of social relations, fanning out in social space and social time’, noting the ‘ “involute” character of the [fetish as] index, which may objectify a whole series of relations in a single form’ (ibid.: 62). Moreover, through the distribution of art objects across time and space, the social relations that they embody are relayed and transformed, as are the objects themselves. The art object therefore has a kind of career: it is transformed not only through its changing interpretation in reception and performance, but it may alter even in its physical form.
At this point it is worth noting the evident parallels between Gell’s account and other relational social theories, including Actor Network Theory (Latour 1993; Law and Hassard 1999), with its focus on the construction of connections between human and non-human actors, and Marilyn Strathern’s (1988, 1999) and Nicholas Thomas’s (1991) concern with distributed persons and the entanglement of objects. Gell therefore contributes to the wider analytical movement in the social sciences towards relational ontologies, one that has recently been linked to a rediscovery of the sociology of Tarde (Barry and Thrift 2007b, 2007a; Candea 2010), as well as the vitalism of Bergson and Whitehead (Bell 2007; Ingold and Hallam 2007). It is also notable that despite Gell’s attempt to distance his approach from semiotics, his theory resonates with Peircian semiotics, notably the idea of the potentially infinite nature of semiosis. In this sense Gell might be seen as proffering a theory of social semiosis.
But Gell makes two further conceptual moves. First, he shifts register with a discussion of style in which he analyses the ‘relations between relations’ or transformational processes that link numerous instances of Marquesan art. He draws an analogy between the relation of the individual artwork to the larger unity of style, and that of the individual human to the larger unity given by kinship principles of descent, alliance or exchange. Just as individuals are seen by Marquesans as ‘portions’ of the collectivity they participate in and divide from – that is, individuals are fragments of the imaginary totality of an indivisible kinship system – so Marquesan art objects are conceived as fragments of the ‘larger [stylistic] unities’ to which they belong. This takes Gell to ‘the notion of a “corpus” of artworks as a kind of spatio-temporally dispersed “population” ’. Such a corpus, he proposes, is a product of the ‘extended mind’, by which he refers to externalized and collectivized cognitive processes (1998: 221–22). While insightful, this is a heavily structuralist, indeed a Durkheimian, reading which recalls the traditional anthropological topos of a bounded and homogeneous social whole. In contrast, other dimensions of Gell’s theory, as I have shown, envisage a different (Tardeian) ontology centred on mediation and the relaying of social relations, which need not invoke such closure.
A final stage of Gell’s theory brings time into the equation. Gell approaches this through a reflection on the oeuvre of Marcel Duchamp and, by analogy, the stylistic unity of the architecture of Maori meeting houses. Here he draws on Husserl’s model of time-consciousness, which emerged in the same period as Duchamp’s early work. For Husserl, events are modified when apprehended from the point of view of present, past or future. Past and future are dynamic states: they continually alter in cognitive time. Central to the dynamic experience of time is the existence of retentions – memories or traces of the past – and protentions – projections or anticipations. The past is always a construction of the present and is experienced through a retention of previous events, just as the future is also a present construct, experienced as a protention of possible outcomes. Both constructs alter as the present evolves through the shifting relations between prehending subject and prehended object (Whitehead 1978).
Using Duchamp to illustrate, Gell takes these Husserlian insights to the analysis of the relations between works in an artist’s oeuvre: how later works are anticipated in earlier ones, and how retentions of earlier works are found in later ones. He proposes that almost all of Duchamp’s works from 1913 were intentionally part of a single, coherent project. ‘It is literally the case that Duchamp’s oeuvre consists of a single distributed object, in that each of Duchamp’s separate works is a preparation for, or a development of, other works of his, and all may be traced, by direct or circuitous pathways, to all the others’ (1998: 245). An oeuvre, Gell concludes, is an object distributed in time, where the relations between individual artworks map out a web of retentions and protentions. Gell extends the argument to the corpus of Maori meeting houses constructed between 1870 and 1930, suggesting that it amounts to a composite object distributed in time and space. ‘Maori meeting houses’, he says, ‘may have been the collective production of many separate artists and builders . . .; yet all are expressions of a common historical trajectory, a common cultural system, of common ideological and political purpose.’
Thus a collective corpus of works, as well as styles (or genres) over time, can also be conceived in terms of a web of retentions and protentions, and as such it integrates particular instances of creativity into a higher-order unity. In Gell’s account the cultural objects or artefacts that compose such a web themselves exercise a type of agency: as secondary agents, via abduction, they point to the existence of primary agents, whose social agency they distribute and circulate. This suggests something that is surprisingly missed by Gell: that the Husserlian account of the dynamics of retention and protention might also be taken to the analysis of temporality in processes specifically of social mediation, a temporality manifest in the attempt to cultivate social relations both by retaining and rearticulating pre-existing relations, and by protending or anticipating new relations. Such an approach to social mediation recalls, again, the recently revitalized sociology of Tarde.1
In light of this brief overview of Gell’s theory, I want to consider four problems, of which the first two – while characteristic of Art and Agency – appear, paradoxically, to find a ‘solution’ in his earlier paper, ‘The Network of Standard Stoppages’. My claim will be, then, that in some ways the earlier paper offers a less anthropologically ‘pure’ (vis-à-vis Art and Agency) and also a more generative version of Gell’s theory. The last two problems will lead us into the second half of the chapter and the discussion of music.
The first problem concerns the biographical depth of focus of Gell’s theory, which he identifies tout court with anthropology. The core of Art and Agency, as I have shown, depends on deciphering relations at this scale and yields tremendous insights. But the attempt to divorce this scale of analysis from any consideration of wider historical processes – social, political, cultural, economic – is unproductive. Indeed it is in tension with some of Gell’s own interpretive moves, which demand a rapprochement with history and sociology, thereby connecting them to the larger canvas of art, cultural and political history. Whether we take his sustained reflections on the oeuvre of Duchamp, or his memorable analysis of the social relations immanent in the Slashed Rokeby Venus in Art and Agency, or his discussion of the art of Damien Hirst and Judith Horn in ‘Vogel’s Net’ (Gell 1999): all of these require Gell to address the relation between the artists and objects at issue and wider historical processes, in this way straining at the conceptual boundaries he has set up. To diagnose what we might call the semantics of human agency and its ‘complex intentionalities’ (ibid.: 212), that is, the particular historical meaning of artists’ interventions and the degree of invention or genericism manifest in the object, Gell has to take stock of Hirst’s and Horn’s links to conceptual art, and of Duchamp’s connections to Dada and Surrealism and his supremely influential status in twentieth-century artistic modernity. The Slashed Rokeby Venus manifests a different dimension of the same problem, since to account for the very existence of this object, as well as the suffragette Mary Richardson’s agency in relation to it, is necessarily to address the invasion of art by other orders of discourse – in this case, by early twentieth-century feminist politics.2
The second problem follows on, and stems from Gell’s approach to time and temporality in Art and Agency. Although the Husserlian phenomenological perspective on time is generative, it requires to be augmented by the analysis of other dimensions of historical time. What is astonishing when one turns to ‘The Network of Standard Stoppages’ – the central theme of which is the representation of duration and continuity in the visual arts and specifically the work of Duchamp – is the commitment with which it pursues questions of history and temporality. In fact it presents an entirely different stance on these issues, and on anthropology’s disciplinary identity, to Art and Agency. The paper is founded on the wish to draw cross-disciplinary connections between the formative period of twentieth-century art (1890–1925) and those of anthropology and philosophy. In particular, Gell traces links between, on the one hand, Bergson, James and Husserl and, on the other hand, Cézanne, Cubism and Duchamp. Arguing that intellectual currents were at work in these years traversing the disciplines, Gell states that such connections have gained insufficient attention ‘because of the over-riding rigidity of disciplinary boundaries’ (Gell, this volume: 88). In several places, he urges anthropology to make good the deficiencies of ‘historical-particularist accounts of “change” ’ (ibid.: 89) provided by historiographers by innovating in historical explanation and the analysis of continuity and change.
Gell’s radical proposal is that anthropologists can do this by drawing on Husserl and the insights from Duchamp’s oeuvre, developing in this way ‘structural models of the temporal domain’ (Gell, this volume: 112), or, as he puts it in full flight, ‘a class of structural models which seek to expose the possibilities and constraints which govern the transformation of elements in structurally integrated systems of relationships forming a totality’ (ibid.: 90). Husserl, he adds, ‘furnishes us with an instrument of great subtlety for handling the conceptual problems of continuity and change in relation to historical and sociological processes, as well as psychological ones’ (ibid.: 107). Change is to be conceived as ‘a problem of order and its transformations, the order that we might otherwise seek in a cycle of myths, the grammar of a language, or the oeuvre of an artist’ (ibid.: 90), or indeed in the evolution and succession of artistic genres and intellectual movements. Even if it is not theorized as such, the phenomenon of change is portrayed in this paper in terms of parallel temporalities operating at different scales, some of them far beyond the biographical. In this way, Gell envisages the kind of expanded anthropology of time in the analysis of cultural production, concerned with delineating multiple temporalities, that is developed in the work of Christopher Pinney (Pinney 2005) and myself (Born 2010a, 2010b). Pinney, addressing time in visual cultures and taking a lead from Lévi-Strauss and Kracauer, argues that ‘To make time “uncontemporaneous” is to insist on its multiplicity and difference’ (2005: 264). My own work pursues in relation to music the question of how an aesthetic domain can constitute history, emphasizing four orders of temporality in music’s relation to social time.
A final welcome feature of Gell’s focus on time in ‘The Network of Standard Stoppages’ is that he attends to the question of invention in relation to Duchamp and, therefore, to his historical impact in the arts. Gell is able to state towards the end of the paper: ‘Studying Duchamp’s total output in this way, we are amazed by the extraordinary degree of inventiveness combined with internal symbolic coherence that it displays.’ He proceeds to affirm Duchamp’s influential role in the emergence of a series of artistic movements, including Futurism, Dada, Surrealism, Minimalism, Op Art, Pop Art and Conceptual Art. Here, once again, Gell’s analysis overreaches biographical scale such that the insights of anthropology merge seamlessly with art and cultural history, while methodological philistinism tips over into anthropologically (or sociologically) informed aesthetic insight and cultural criticism. For me, this paper reveals another Gell, propitiously released from his disciplinary super-ego, and his work is conceptually the richer for it.
The last two limitations of Gell’s approach in Art and Agency are not answered by ‘The Network of Standard Stoppages’, and are thus less easily resolved. The first concerns the book’s Durkheimian orientation in the account of social mediation – one that is in considerable tension with the more Peircian figuring of a continuous relay or circulation of social relations through the artwork. The Durkheimian stance is evident at several levels: not only in the drawing of direct homologies between social organization and stylistic organization (Chapter 8) and the inclination to depict social groups as holistic and homogeneous, but, as Miller observes, in the valorization of art objects in terms of their extrinsic social functions – a propensity that he links to the sacralization and reification of social relations in neo-Durkheimian British social anthropology (Miller 2005). This in turn highlights a resilient, if ambivalent, humanism in Gell. For despite his attempt to incorporate the agency of things, with his insistence on biographical scale and his view of the art object as a ‘function of the social-relational matrix in which it is embedded’, Gell reinscribes not only disciplinary boundaries between social anthropology and sociology or history, but conceptual dualisms between subject and object, and between the problematic of non-Western and Western art. Ironically, by deferring a full engagement with the specifically aesthetic properties of cultural objects, Gell risks an anthropological version of the sociological reductionism that he himself rightly condemns. I will argue that music requires a quite different account of social mediation in cultural production.
The fourth and final limitation of Art and Agency that I want to highlight points to the present interest in questions of ontology. In previous papers I have drawn attention to the way that anthropological and sociological research necessarily exists at the interface of two dimensions of ontology (Born 2005, 2010a, 2010b). The first dimension is the ontology that characterizes the theoretical and methodological stance of the analyst; it is obvious that much of the excitement generated by Art and Agency stems from this dimension, due to Gell’s imaginative recasting of the entire frame of research on cultural production. In this, as I mentioned, his work forms part of a wave of distinctive relational ontologies sweeping across the social sciences. The second dimension is the ontology of the object – that is, the ontology that characterizes the particular cultural practices, the social world of cultural production, under study. This dimension Gell neglects, and as a result, his theory is weakened. If Gell provides a powerful theory of art’s mediation by social relations, then an additional conceptual move is required of any theory of cultural production that aspires to be both explanatory and adequate to its object: from mediation to ontology.
In the second half of the chapter I want to show, with reference to three historical examples, how research on music throws light on the problems that I have identified with Gell’s schema, and points to ways forward. But why is music an especially instructive object for Gellian analysis and more generally for theories of art and cultural production?
First, music shows that beyond the visual- and artefact-centrism characteristic of theories of art and material culture, there need not be a physical artefact or a visual object or symbol at the centre of the analysis of materiality, mediation and semiosis. Nor are these forms of analysis antithetical; indeed for music all three are necessarily entwined. Music has its own very particular material and semiotic properties (Born 1991, 1993b; Born and Hesmondhalgh 2000a; Nattiez 1983, 1990a, 1990b, 1999) that not only extend the scope of existing theories, but offer wider insights. In terms of its core as musical sound, music is a non-representational, non-artefactual, alogogenic medium. Lacking a denotative level of meaning, in most human cultures musical sound engenders a profusion of extra-musical connotations of diverse kinds (visual, sensual, emotional, intellectual) that are projected into the musical sound object while experienced as deriving naturally from it.
Given these profuse significations, ethnomusicologists confirm the universal existence of social interpretations of music expressed in systems of talk, knowledge and theory about music, usually in the form of common linguistic metaphors attached to music (Feld 1984a, 1984b; Feld and Fox 1994). At the same time, musical sound is irreducible to such linguistic mediation; as Feld puts it, ‘speech about music represents an attempt to construct a metaphoric discourse to signify awareness of the more fundamental metaphoric discourse that music communicates in its own right’ (1984a: 93). My own work has added a concern with the way that linguistic metaphors for musical sound combine and cohere into ramifying fields of discourse or discursive formations (Foucault 1972; Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983), thereby raising questions of power – the differential power to define, circulate and institutionalize music’s meanings (Born 1995).
A second point takes us beyond language; for if linguistic mediation is pervasive, music’s mediation is not reducible to language alone. More obviously than visual and literary media, music has no material essence but a plural and distributed material being. Music favours associations between musicians and instruments, composers and scores, listeners and sound systems, music programmers and digital code – that is, between subjects and objects. Its multiple simultaneous forms of existence – as sonic object and aural trace, as the object of discursive exegesis, as intersubjective and embodied, social and ritualized performance, as notated or graphic score, as technological prosthesis or medium – indicate the necessity of conceiving of the musical object as a constellation of mediations which are not only discursive and ideational, but social and performative, visual, technological, and so on. In this sense, we might speak of music’s multitextuality – of the distribution of its meaning, and of musical experience, across these plural mediations.
Compared with the visual and literary arts, then, music has to be grasped as an extraordinarily complex kind of cultural object – as an aggregation of sonic, social, discursive, visual, technological, corporeal and temporal mediations: as a musical assemblage (De Landa 2006; Deleuze 1988; Rabinow 2003), where this is defined as a characteristic constellation of such heterogeneous mediations. Thus the properties (or meanings) of music cannot be analysed in isolation, but must be cognized in terms of the assemblage – or constellation of mediations – of which music is composed; while the affordances of any musical assemblage can be traced through the network of associations between human and non-human entities that it embodies (Latour 2005). In its plurality, music has the oxymoronic quality of being at once immaterial (as sound, or code) and multiply material; it might be conceived as the paradigmatic multiply-mediated, immaterial-and-material, fluid quasi-object, one in which subjects and objects are continuously mutually engaged and entangled (Born 2005, 2012).
Third, if these properties make music a perplexing object, then other writers come closer to Gell’s account of mediation, portraying a complementary property of music: its mediation of subject-object relations. As DeNora (2000: 40) puts it, ‘Music is active within social life: just as music’s meanings may be constructed in relation to things outside it, so, too, things outside music may be constructed in relation to music.’ Hennion takes this perspective further, dwelling on the intimate mediation between music lover and musical sound in the co-production of taste – where taste is a mutually transformative relation cultivated through a range of practices and techniques. ‘Bodies, spaces, durations, gestures, regular practice, technical devices, objects, guides, apprenticeship’ (Hennion 2003: 90) – all point to taste as an accomplishment. Music therefore ‘transforms those who take possession of it’ such that it makes sense to speak of ‘the co-formation of a music and of those who make it and listen to it’ (Hennion 2001: 3). Hence the bidirectional nature both of music’s mediation and of human and non-human agency in music: music constituting human subjectivities and socialities, while music is itself constituted in social imagination, in discourse and practice, and in and through its copious and diverse socialities and socio-technical relations.
A fourth observation, following on, is that music necessitates an expansion of the conceptual framework of social mediation. For if music engenders myriad social forms, rather than Gell’s Durkheimian leanings or DeNora’s and Hennion’s microsociologies, it demands to be analysed in terms of four orders of social mediation, in this way resisting any hint of holistic closure. In the first order, music produces its own varied social relations – in the immediate microsocialities of musical performance and practice, in the social relations embodied in musical ensembles and associations, and in the musical division of labour. Second, music has powers to animate imagined communities, aggregating its listeners into collectivities or publics based on musical and other identifications: collectivities that may reproduce and memorialize extant social formations, prefigure emergent social formations, or constitute imaginary social cosmologies (Born 1993a, 2011; Born and Hesmondhalgh 2000a; Stokes 1994). Third, music refracts broader social relations, from the most concrete and intimate to the most abstract of collectivities – music’s instantiation of the nation, of social hierarchy and stratification, or of the dynamics of class, race and gender. Fourth, music is bound up in the social and institutional orders that provide the basis for its production, reproduction and transformation, whether elite or religious patronage, market exchange, the arena of public and subsidized cultural institutions, or late capitalism’s multi-polar cultural economy.
The point is that all four orders of social mediation enter into the musical assemblage: the four are irreducible to one another, and are articulated in contingent and non-linear ways through relations of affordance, conditioning or causality. The first two orders amount to socialities and social relations that are configured or mobilized by specifically musical practice and experience. In contrast, the last two orders represent wider social conditions that themselves afford certain kinds of musical practice – although these social conditions also enter into the nature of musical experience, permeating music’s immediate socialities and imagined communities. Thus, the microsocialities of musical performance and practice, suffused as they are by the social relations of the ensemble, suffused as these social relations may be by wider social relations as well as the imaginary identity formations and cosmological imaginaries afforded by music: all of these orders of social mediation may enter into aesthetic experience for participants, listeners or audiences. Moreover, if this relay of social relations – from wider social dynamics, to music-ensemble relations, to performance microsocialities – may sometimes be homologous, this is not inevitable. Indeed in their autonomy, the microsocialities of performance and practice and social relations of the ensemble can be contrary to, and may become crucibles of transformation of or experimentation with, prevailing social relations. Rather than the four orders of social mediation being isomorphic, ethnography can reveal more complex and surprising relations between them.
To illustrate: Roseman (1984) and I (1995) have both shown that the microsocialities of musical practice and performance, and the egalitarian cosmologies attached to them, are in each case inversions of the broader structure of hierarchical or stratified social relations that characterize, respectively, Temiar society and the computer music institute IRCAM in Paris. These are lived and enduring contradictions that in both ethnographic examples contribute powerfully to the nature of socio-musical experience – by offering a compensatory or alternative social space that fashions the social world differently. In sum, to acknowledge the four orders of social mediation that imbue music, and the potential disjunctures and contradictions between them, is to question any notion that the analysis of social relations at biographical scale can be divorced from wider socio-historical conditions.
A fifth reason why music is compelling is that it is possible to trace historically the coexistence and co-evolution of high-cultural and popular forms: in the East, the changing relations between ‘classicized’ art musics and vernacular musics, as is evident, for example, in the Mughal construction of hierarchical relationships between ‘a subset of cultural practices, to which music belonged, set apart from and higher than other skills and crafts’ and the merely local or vernacular (Butler Schofield 2010: 497); in the West, the lineages of Western classical, romantic and modernist art musics unfolding alongside the emergence and development of ramifying musical vernaculars and commercial popular musics (Born 1987). While Western popular music cultures scavenged stylistically on aspects of art music, Western art musics drew aesthetic elements from Western and non-Western musical vernaculars, with increasing intensity from the early twentieth century through the use of recording technologies (Gendron 2002; Middleton 2000a; Pasler 2000). These bi- or multi-polar musical appropriations were predicated on all sides on evolving constructions by Western music theorists from the late nineteenth century of their differences as socio-musical universes (Born and Hesmondhalgh 2000b; Rehding 2005). This is a history that resists any account of music’s historical condition as unitary. Instead it poses particularly acutely the problem of accounting for music’s meta-historical differences through a relational socio-musical analysis (Born 2010c). These differences, as contemporary music scholarship demonstrates, have to be understood not only in terms of contrasting assemblages, but distinctive ontologies. Music, that is, poses the question of how to analyse its plural ontologies, as well as the articulation between mediation and ontology.
The theme of ontology is now prominent in ethnomusicology and musicology. From the former, Bohlman has recently made a general case for pluralizing our understanding of music’s ontologies (Bohlman 1999). Refusing to privilege the West, he argues that ‘the processes that lead to the imagination and construction of a musical ontology assemble it from various metaphysical conditions, but they strive toward an ontology that expresses and resides in some understanding of self-identity’ (ibid.: 34). Bohlman catalogues the extraordinarily diverse range of cosmological, cultural and material elements that figure in music’s ontologies, from its role in identity formation, building community and marking boundaries, to its embeddedness in and construction of the experience of time and nature, the sacred and the mundane, the body and technology. The effect is to challenge any universalizing assumptions about music’s metaphysical condition.
To analyse the substantive plurality of music’s ontologies, an additional conceptual step is necessary: from mediation to ontology. Having grasped the multiple mediations that characterize any musical culture, it is possible to address how those mediations are marked or valorized, acknowledged or absented, ontologically. This depends on the proposition that music’s ontologies presuppose and privilege certain practices, social and material arrangements, while absenting or disavowing others. In short, my argument will be that if Gell’s analysis operates primarily at the level of the assemblage – in that it enables us to conceive of music as a distributed object that both condenses and is constituted by social relations, material and discursive mediations – then in certain musical cultures, his approach is confounded at the level of ontology, since what is encountered is a metaphysics that denies or marginalizes music’s social and material mediation. To make this case, I offer a comparative analysis of three prominent and contrasting music ontologies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: first, the romantic ideal of fidelity to the musical work, or Werktreue, which emerged around 1800 and has since prevailed over the practices of Western art music (Goehr 1992); second, the ontology of twentieth-century African-American jazz; and third, an ontology of performance- or event-centred music that unites a range of Western art music genres, notably American experimental music and European free improvisation, from the mid-twentieth century.
Goehr’s genealogy of the idealist ontology of the musical work is predicated on the need to examine ‘how the work-concept has actually functioned in practice’ (Goehr 1992: 5). To this end, her study traces a constellation of interrelated changes that gathered pace across the nineteenth century, many of them conforming to the Weberian thesis of the progressive rationalization and autonomization of music (Weber 1958). They include the rise of the romantic principle that musical invention depended on the self-expression of the individual composer-genius; the advent of a ‘work-based practice’ centred on the idea that musical works were perfectly finished and irreducible to any particular performance; the growth of heightened principles of precision in music notation and the vesting of unprecedented authority in the musical score; the rise of moral norms and legal codes that enshrined the composer’s originality and the need to protect him from plagiarism through intellectual property rights; a rigidification and hierarchization of the musical division of labour between composer, interpreter(s) and audience; and the crystallization of new forms of reception, in which concert-goers aspired to being silent, contemplative, motionless and worshipful in order to experience the truth and beauty of the work.
Throughout, Goehr highlights the distance effected by the ontology of the work between the work ideal and its mundane realization in actual musical practice or performance. The work is thus taken to transcend any particular musical experience. At the same time, bracketing the work ontology, Goehr recognizes that there is no single privileged location of musical meaning, but that it is distributed across, and configured by the relations between, music’s multiple social, material and discursive mediations. As she points out, ‘There is nothing about the concept of a work, the relations between works and performances, or works and scores, or works and experiences of them, that is going to tell us where the locus of musical meaning “really” resides’ (1992: 278). Thus a striking feature of Goehr’s study is the implicit method by which she charts the distance or contradiction between ontology and assemblage. The method entails an analysis both of music’s ontologies and of its mediations, where the relation between the two takes the form of an ontological freighting of certain mediations: a hierarchization in which some elements of musical experience – work ideal, composer genius, Urtext – are endowed with heightened metaphysical significance, while other elements of music making – performance, instruments, recordings, sheet music – are relatively unmarked. The ontology of the work therefore amounts to a hierarchical or vertical ontology in which neither score, nor recording, nor performance are equal to the work ideal. Rather, such material and social mediations are disavowed or understood to be secondary: they are not essential to music, not conceived as immanent in the work.
Lest it be thought that this situation is merely historical, in my ethnography of the vanguard Parisian computer music institute, IRCAM, founded in the late 1970s by the composer and conductor Pierre Boulez, the metaphysics of Werktreue were pronounced and presided over the Institute’s functioning (Born 1995). Despite a compositional practice in computer music that was dispersed across myriad human and non-human actors, a hierarchical discourse of the primacy of composer and work prevailed. In practice authorship was typically distributed across and between (usually visiting) composer, IRCAM’s computer-music ‘tutors’ or composers’ assistants, themselves often composers or skilled programmers, who were responsible for handling the technical apparatus in compositional projects, computer programmes designed specifically for music production at IRCAM, complex hardware configurations, and scientific research projects linked intimately to the composer’s project. Yet invariably, the Institute vested authorship solely in the composer.
When we turn to ethnographic and historical scholarship on twentieth-century jazz, a quite different ontological settlement comes into view. Jazz’s ontology and its embeddedness in a particular assemblage of mediations are portrayed in seminal studies by Paul Berliner and Ingrid Monson (Berliner 1994; Monson 1996). From these studies it is apparent that jazz manifests an ontology that is in marked contrast to the vertical ontology of the work concept. The ontology of jazz is lateral and processual; it acknowledges and valorizes the movement or oscillation between two crucibles or focal moments of creative practice. First, there is the moment of performance as a dialogical, participatory creative act grounded in an aesthetics of collaborative improvisation, in which the interaction is at once social and musical. Monson demonstrates how the interactional qualities of jazz embody African-American aesthetics as they are also manifest in linguistic techniques such as verbal duelling, mimicry and signifying, themselves characterized by ‘repetition with a difference’ and ironic intertextuality (Monson 1996: 103–4). By analogy, she explores jazz’s ‘intermusicality’, its aesthetics of musical allusion, parody and pastiche (ibid.: Chapter 4).
Second, there is the capture of the moment of performance in commodity form by recording, an objectification that enables improvised performance to be disseminated and known beyond its original time and location. In this form it becomes the aural means of educating and socializing other musicians and later generations, who are thereby empowered to create something new or to cover, rework or transform the original performance in subsequent improvised performances. Indeed Berliner emphasizes the centrality of recording as it circulates in commodity form to the history and aesthetics of jazz, for despite the growth since the 1940s of jazz transcription, recordings are believed to remain the key means of style transmission and aural training, the authoritative source of musical subtlety and truth. As Berliner describes it,
[Musicians] hung out at one another’s homes ‘listening to records together, humming the solos till we learned them’ . . . When learning new solos from recordings, [some] commit endless hours to the task . . . Once absorbed from recordings, solos pass from one aspiring artist to another . . . Although experienced improvisers regard published materials as valuable learning aids, they caution against becoming too dependent on them. Without comparing transcriptions to the original recordings, students cannot determine the accuracy of the transcription . . . Moreover, all transcriptions are reductive representations of performance and provide learners with little information about the fundamental stylistic features of jazz. (Berliner 1994: 96, 98)
Jazz therefore manifests a processual ontology involving a cumulative movement between two kinds of focal musical event: performance (1) > recording (1) > performance (2) > recording (2) > performance (3) . . . and so on – a circulatory metaphysics in which both social and material mediation are conceived as generative of the cumulative aesthetic evolution of the musical object, and as central to the nature of musical experience. Successive re-creations are thought to be afforded and communicated both by performance and as objectified by recording in the commodity form. The distributed object that is the jazz assemblage is understood to condense and relay both subject-object relations, human and material agency, and the social relations immanent in its history and re-creation – the latter including both the immediate, dialogical socialities of jazz performance, and the experiences of race and class articulated in this ‘black counter-culture of modernity’ (Gilroy 1993). Indeed, in marked contrast to the ontology of the work, the jazz ontology embraces all four orders of social mediation mentioned earlier, all of which – dialogical creative and performance practices, the imagined community hailed by African-American musical aesthetics, the encompassing social relations of race and class, and jazz’s dependence on commodity exchange – are experienced as integral to jazz’s aesthetic operations and its socio-musical being.
Jazz’s ontology, unlike the ontology of the work, effects no split between ideal musical object and particular instantiation; nor does it construe a hierarchy between creator and interpreter. There is no unchanging work that stands outside history, but a cumulative historical chain of musical objects and events. In jazz, the sociality of music making, its musical issue, music’s commodity form, recording technologies and industry are all believed to bear agency and to contribute to the composite musical object (or index). This is not to deny jazz’s capacity for self-idealization, evident in a pronounced metaphysics of musical co-presence in performance. Nor is it to deny jazz’s susceptibility to canonization and ‘work-ness’, manifest in attempts to systematize improvisation through the notation of solos and of particular musicians’ performance styles as the basis for rote learning – developments fostered by the institutionalization of jazz education and the legitimation of jazz as a modernist art form in the later twentieth century.
But there is another point to make here. The ontology that I have attributed to jazz is not confined to it. Its main features are shared with a number of black electronic popular music genres that traversed the Black Atlantic region from the 1950s on, including such genres as reggae, dub, ska, rocksteady, rap and hip hop and their derivatives (Hebdige 1987; Rose 1994; Toop 1984). All of them entail practices of re-composition in which pre-recorded tracks and sounds are mixed and remixed live with other sounds through techniques such as toasting and scratching, the latter involving the use and abuse of mundane consumer technologies. Not only do these genres centre on improvised performance based on the cumulative reworking of existing musical objects, but they construe a cultural economy in which live performance and music’s commodified forms are understood to coexist in a creative symbiosis that fosters musical evolution. Performances are captured and circulated in (often commercial) recordings, and thereby distributed across space, time and persons; music becomes an object of recurrent decomposition, composition and re-composition by a series of creative agents – a relayed creativity. In these black electronic popular musics, performance and recorded object are experienced both as irreducibly focal musical events, and as provisional – as providing the means for further re-creation. A similar ontology is operative, shorn of certain resonances afforded by social mediation, in most African-American-influenced Western popular musics; it is also apparent in contemporary digitized dance musics (Butler 2011). In terms of ontology, then, and for all their manifold differences, we might speak of the existence of family resemblances between these musics.
The third music ontology that I want to identify, while it coexisted with them, departs both from the ontology of the work and from the processual ontology characteristic of jazz and black popular musics. At the same time, it retains certain direct but ambivalent or disavowed connections both to ‘work-ness’ and to the jazz ontology. It is discernable in two genres of late-twentieth-century experimental art music: first, the lineage of American experimental music that followed the influential interventions of John Cage from the 1950s (Piekut 2011; Nyman 1974) and second, the European tradition of free improvisation which blossomed from the 1960s, itself another branch of experimentalism (Bailey 1993). Historical links and crossovers exist between the two, although they had largely distinct spheres of circulation; moreover, ‘circumstantial’ evidence exists that both genres were indebted to aspects of the parallel history of the postwar jazz avant-gardes (Lewis 1996). Both centre on music as a live performance event; but in the ontology of experimentalism, the valorization of performance-as-event carries also strong, explicit and implicit, negational intent. Both lineages are predicated on an outright rejection of the metaphysics of the work. Both abandon score-based determinism. Both set out to play with or undermine the hierarchical musical division of labour between composer, performer and audience characteristic of Werktreue.3
But crucially, while these musics, like jazz, are live-performance based, unlike the jazz ontology they do not positively acknowledge the importance of recording or of music’s commodity forms. Rather, both lineages encompass musicians and theorists who inveigh against music’s fixing in the score or in recorded form precisely because, in objectifying music, these material mediations also reify it and render it as property. Thus, for one influential 1960s experimental group, the Rome-based American electronic music collective Musica Elettronica Viva, music – in the guise of performance – was antithetical to private property; it necessitated ‘non-ownership’, a renunciation of copyright and royalties (Beal 2009). Performance is therefore conceived not as a complement to recording, but as its opposite: as the sole locus of musical authenticity and truth. The corollary is another marked departure from the ontology of jazz: the performance event, being seen as in essence untethered to recording and to commodification, is also conceived as having no temporally evolving form. In the ontology of experimentalism where music amounts to the performance event, a sequence of such events approaches the condition of a palimpsest: a musical event occurs, but it does not matter if it is not captured in material form, if it is not thereby learned from, if it does not evolve. There is, rather, a sedimentation of singular events, of live socio-musical associations; if recording occurs, its issue is experienced as a material residue that retains but does not creatively protend; it is not considered an actor or participant in any cumulative aesthetic development.
Three features, including two paradoxes, can now be identified as definitive of the ontology of experimentalism. The first paradox concerns recording. Although experimentalism tends not to valorize recording as part of a relayed or distributed creative process, nor to acknowledge commodification as an element in the social life of music, experimental performances have of course been recorded since the later decades of the twentieth century, and those recordings circulate as commodities. Recording, then, forms part of the assemblage, but this is a reality that has been downplayed or denied ontologically.
The second paradox concerns ‘work-ness’; for despite the explicit critique of the ontology of the work that underpins American experimentalism, in practice, in symptomatic ways, the critical distance can crumble. Cage, for example, aspired through the use of chance procedures and indeterminacy in composition to escape from his own musical personality and authorial control, while embracing improvisational and everyday elements of music and noise making. Yet it seems to have been difficult for him to divest himself of the conceptual furniture of work-based composerly intentionality and control. Thus, reflecting on the performance of his piece 26’ 1.1499” for a String Player by the cellist and impresaria Charlotte Moorman, Cage expressed great unhappiness about her interpretation. He commented hyperbolically: ‘The striking thing was to take this piece of mine and play it in a way that didn’t have to do with the piece itself. I didn’t like it at all. And my publisher said, the best thing that could happen for you, would be that Charlotte Moorman would die’ (Piekut 2011: 263). Musica Elettronica Viva, in contrast, saw their practice as centred on free improvised performances that bordered on cathartic collective rituals, performances that were open to non-musicians and might last for hours. Nonetheless, MEV grasped the paradox: Frederic Rzewski, a key figure, said of a 1968-published ‘plan’ for a performance event titled Spacecraft that it amounted to a ‘form for music that has no form’. He added later that ‘Spacecraft was [still] a composition in the sense that it was based on a particular combination of ideas’ (Beal 2009: 108). The break with the ontology of the work, then, was ambivalent and incomplete.
The third feature of the ontology of experimentalism, notable in comparison with that of jazz, is its relatively attenuated concern with social mediation. Of the four orders recognized by jazz’s ontology, it is the first – the socialities of performance and of the ensemble – that figures prominently in the ontology of experimentalism, amounting to a key locus of its departure from the work ontology. But beyond this first order, there is a vacillating engagement with social mediation, such that the social relations of race, class or gender, or the institutional forms that support the production of music, are generally experienced as extraneous to the musical event, while the generative potential of these mediations is only occasionally acknowledged.
Although I have taken care in the previous section to distinguish between three ontologies of music, pointing to the alternative ways in which they construe what music is, it is important to qualify the analysis. These are distinctive music ontologies, but at the same time, as I have hinted, each exhibits, to a greater or lesser extent and in changing ways over time, characteristics of the others. On the one hand, some writers have commented on the work-like qualities of Euro-American popular musics (Middleton 2000b); and I drew passing attention to jazz’s ‘work’ leanings and to the historical attempts to legitimize and canonize some types of jazz as modernist art music (Gendron 2009). On the other hand, it is becoming common to highlight the improvisational qualities of the performance and even the composition of Western art music (Benson 2003), thus attempting to lessen its ontological difference from other forms of human music making. Yet despite these qualifications, the ontological differences outlined remain resilient, and some of the effort being expended on eliding them seems misguided. The nature of improvisation, to take an obvious point of contention, is quite different when applied to the interpretation of scores or the working out of material in the production of a scored composition as against when it is understood to be the primary act of musical creation in live performance. Improvisation is practically, materially and aesthetically different in each of these settings, above all because these differences come enmeshed in distinctive music ontologies. At stake in this debate is the acceptance or refusal of what might be called a musical multinaturalism (Latour 2002; Vivieros De Castro 1998).
In this light, to restate my core argument: all three musics amount to assemblages constituted by a relay of social and material mediation, apparently in accord with Gell’s theory. All three are indeed constituted by a nexus of social relations, but much hinges on how we conceive of this nexus. In all three, the social and material mediations have been subject to profound historical transformations – via recording, music’s multiplying commodification, intensifying circulation and so on. Yet in terms of ontology, these mediations, and these pervasive historical developments, are accorded different status and experienced in radically divergent ways across the three musics. In sum, ontology is irreducible to assemblage and vice versa, and it is important to understand both, as well as the relations between them.
In attending to music’s social mediation I have had to expand considerably on the account of art’s social mediation proffered by Gell. Where, in his analysis, abduction stands concretely and thinly for the inference that the object is the outcome of social agency, with reference to distinctive ontologies of music I have elaborated on the types of ramifying social agency that may be taken to be immanent in the musical object. Notable here are my second, third and fourth orders of social mediation: music’s capacity to animate or aggregate those imaginary collectivities or publics called into being by specifically musical identifications; music’s capacity to refract broader, non-musical social relations; and the wider social and institutional conditions that enable a certain music to exist. Gell’s account of abduction, and of social agency, is too thin because of the arbitrary limitation of the scope of analysis in Art and Agency to biographical scale and the unwarranted association made between this scale and anthropology per se. Music, because of its immanent socialities and social multiplicity, makes these limitations more obvious than the object arts. The non-linear, decentred analytic of four orders of social mediation that I have sketched departs both from Art and Agency’s Durkheimian inclinations and from an alternative, Tardeian or Latourian rendering of the social in the guise of processes of association and of the unlimited relay of social relations. Both are inadequate as frameworks for analysing the social relations immanent in the art or musical object.
To acknowledge the four orders of social mediation and their entanglement with changing regimes of materiality in music and art is to insist that the analysis of social relations at biographical scale cannot be divorced from broader cultural-historical movements and socio-historical conditions. History enables us to understand how particular music ontologies are constituted in part through connections and relations – of imitation, or differentiation – with other, prior or coexistent musics, as well as with other artistic movements and ideologies: the black American jazz avant-garde, for instance, with the Black Arts Movement (Gendron 2009); experimental music with conceptual and performance art (Nyman 1974; Piekut 2011); European free improvisation with American free jazz (Lewis 1996). To grasp an ontology of music requires an analysis of its historical trajectory and relative positioning: a relational analysis (Born 2010c). Moreover, bringing history and ontology into the picture makes it possible to address the politics of music and art, an absence in Gell’s oeuvre (Harris 2001; Pinney and Thomas 2001). In the music ontologies that I have discussed, the political is always relative to, and motivates, the reigning ontology. Indeed politics occurs both ‘within’ the governing ontology, appearing as rival, sometimes conflictual alternatives – between Cageian experimentalism and the free improvisation movement, for example; and between ontologies, evident, for instance, in the jockeying for historical pre-eminence between work-oriented IRCAMian modernism and Cageian experimentalism. We might speak, then, of the political as always already ontological – of an ontological politics (Mol 2002: viii) – and of the musical imagination as also, at times, an ontological-political imagination (Born 2005, 2012).
It will be clear that I have sided more in this chapter with the Gell of ‘The Network of Standard Stoppages’, a Gell that recedes from view in the purified disciplinary thought of Art and Agency, although one aim has been to effect a realignment of these Gells. In addressing Euro-American musics of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, I have necessarily had recourse to anthropologically inflected historical scholarship. I have done this in order to make sense of musical assemblage and ontology, and thereby the complex intentionalities immanent in them, probing each ontology in terms of its rendering of musical process and object, but also examining the historical interrelations – the dynamics of influence or borrowing, negation or disavowal – between them. This is closer to the conceptual scheme of the earlier paper, and it seems to me that Gell had to abandon aspects of that scheme to bring to a kind of imperfect perfection the seminal book that is the focus of this volume. This predilection of mine may be in part a matter of personal taste; but I have tried, by expounding a methodology as relevant potentially to art or any form of cultural production as music, to provide arguments as to why the purification of his thought in that marvellous book also entails a certain loss of analytical acumen.
1. On music’s capacity to protend new social relations and social identity formations, see Born and Hesmondhalgh 2000a, Born 2011.
2. On the importance of analysing artists’ practices in relation to wider historical processes, and particularly how they position themselves in relation to the ongoing trajectories of genre, see Born 2010b.
3. There are clear parallels with contiguous movements in the visual arts born of critiques of ‘white cube’ visual modernism, notably the development of conceptual and performance art (Osborne 2002; Skrebowski 2009).
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