This paper summarised my PhD research, which focused on epsitemological dimensions of researching music (and other cultural forms) in the context of the global present

Nolan, Ryan

Falmouth University Research Repository (FURR)

BSA annual conference: ‘Remaking the Future’Deadline for paper upload March 7th 2021Music and contemporaneityTemporality, scale and the global(ised) presentBefore we can begin to ‘remake the future’, necessary though such a project may be (now morethan ever), we must first attend to the conditions of the historical present, those processes andpractices that render it the way it is. My contention is that rather than concentrating onspeculative futures or whether something can be said to be sufficiently new or have been‘remade’, attention must be directed towards when and how the present itself—of a particularproject, political movement, or work of art—comes into existence. In this respect I turn to thenotion of ‘contemporaneity’, here conceived as a constitutive condition of the historical present,but I will go into this in more detail momentarily.One way of doing this is to examine how present is both mediated through, and as it itselfmediates, artistic and cultural practices. As my title suggests, I think music is a particularlyuseful medium of production through which to conduct such a project. The analytical, and indeedpolitical, utility of music, I would suggest, resides in its embedeness in everyday life. Torepurpose a phrase from art historian Ben Burbridge (originally speaking on photography), ‘in itspresent state [music] exemplifies the best and worst of what we can be’.1 Such a propositionprovides this talk, and my wider phd project from which it is derived, with a certain criticalperspective, and serves as an appropriate metaphor for the larger political project with which itgrapples (which at its core is a global politics of time).Contemporaneity1 Burbridge says this about photography, I reappropriate here in reference to music. See PhotographyAfter Capitalism (London: Goldsmiths Press, 2020), p. 18. COMMENT FROM GEOFF: reminds me ofBenjamin Noys, "This paradox [of value] is simply stated: on the one hand, the artist is the mostcapitalist subject, the one who subjects themselves to value extraction willingly and creatively, whoprefigures the dominant trend lines of contemporary capitalism [...] on the other hand, the artist is theleast capitalist subject, the one who resists value extraction through an alternative and excessiveself-valorisation that can never be contained by capitalism.” The most capitalist subject is the leastcapitalist subject at the same time.1The philosopher Peter Osborne’s work has been influential in thinking about contemporaneity ina critical context, where the term has been stripped of its colloquial definition of things occurringin the same chronological period of time to describe the complex temporal logic of the historicalpresent as a site of heterogeneous forms of time. In his 2013 book Anywhere or Not At All,Osborne describes contemporaneity as ‘a coming together not simply “in” time, but of times.’ Hecarries on to say ‘we do not just live or exist together in time with our contemporaries—as iftime itself is indifferent to this existing together—but rather the present is increasinglycharacterized by a coming together of different but equally “present” temporalities or “times”, atemporal unity in disjunction, or a disjunctive unity of present times’.2Such a conception of the present, for Osborne, is a product of the spatial expansion of Westernmodernity, which can thus be classified as the temporal logic of global(ised) capitalism. As such,‘contemporaneity’ comes to stand in for the experience of various social and cultural times thatdeveloped along their own historical trajectories and which have been increasingly broughttogether in what Osborne has called a ‘disjunctive conjunction’. To point to the historical forcesthat have contributed to this conjuncture, often highlighted are the transnational character ofpost-89 global politics, the emergence of what Arjun Appadurai called the ‘global-culturaleconomy’, and the pervasiveness of media technologies and Bratton’s ‘planetary computation’.3But I’m not going to expand on these points here.Contemporary art/cultural productionAdopting such an understanding of contemporaneity complicates, or at least modifies, themeanings of notions like ‘contemporary art’ or ‘contemporary culture’. In Osborne’s terms, theystop referring to an empirical totalisation of art or cultural production at the time of a givenpresent.4 For something to be contemporary in this critical conception, it must be said tocontribute to the production of the present itself. This is what gives it its critical, and thus also itsexclusionary, character (not everything can be ‘contemporary’ in this regard).4 Osborne, Anywhere or Not At All, p. 2.3 Appadurai, Bratton, The Stack (MIT Press, 2015).2 Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not At All (London: Verso, 2013), p. 17.2Osborne himself comes to quite specific conclusions regarding the philosophical character of‘contemporary art’, owing to the significance he places on the conceptual art project of the 1960sand his dedication to the post-Kantian romantic philosophy of art (particularly as the tradition ofKant, Hegel, Schelling has been mediated in the work of Theodor Adorno). Briefly put, thisleads Osborne to the conclusion that contemporary art is ontologically ‘postconceptual’—acategory that recognises the ineliminable aesthetic dimension of all art (the success of conceptualart’s failure) while affording primacy to the concept across all material instantiations ofindividual artworks, emphasising the conceptual character of much contemporary art.5Thus, Osborne arrives at a position that stresses art’s conceptual, material, and relationaldimension, returning to an almost Baumgartian sense of the ‘aesthetic’ (though again mediatedby Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory) as related to the spatio-temporal sensuousness and distributedmaterialisation of autonomous works. This perspective enables a re-reading of the art of the past60 or so years from the position of the historical present, what Osborne has come to call a‘historical ontology of art’.6Criticisms and lack of theorisation of the socialIn affording primacy to the conceptual dimension and distributed materiality of autonomousworks of contemporary art, Osborne’s philosophy has come under scrutiny from a number ofdisciplinary perspectives. One such line of critique has been levelled at the seeming extrapolationof ‘Western contemporary art into an existing Western-centric scheme’, which Osborne elevatesto contemporary art as such.7 However, this criticism isn’t what I want to focus on here. Rather,in the context of this conference, I turn to sociologist and anthropologist Georgina Born’scontention that Osborne (among many others it must be said) fails to sufficiently theorise the7 Ian A. McLean, 'The necessity of the new: between the modern and the contemporary', in N. Croggonand H. Hughes eds., Three Reflections on Contemporary Art History (Melbourne: Discipline, 2014), pp.15–52.6 Anywhere or Not At All, p. 22.5 See Peter Osborne, ‘The Postconceptual Condition: Or the Cultural Logic of High Capitalism Today’, inThe Postconceptual Condition (London: Verso, 2018).3social dimension of art in the globally interconnected context of contemporaneity. As Born putsit,Rather than re-theorize art’s “ineliminable” aesthetic dimension, Osborne ultimatelydevelops a post-Adornian conception of the aesthetic dimension by equating it with art’s“materialization,” that is, its “felt, spatio-temporal” presentation—where this excludesfrom feeling, space, and time any social dimension. Indeed, here and elsewhere, forOsborne the “spatial” (in the guise of the geopolitical, or art’s transnationalization orglobalization) appears to represent an inadequate stand-in, theoretically, for any diagnosisof art’s plural social mediations.8Arguing for what she calls a ‘social aesthetics’, Born rejects the idea that ‘one can or shoulddisentangle the social, in all its varied modalities, from experiences and conceptions of theaesthetic.’9 As such, for Born, art’s social dimension plays a constitutive role that transcends theconceptual or material (in the sense of its spatio-temporal physicality), situating works of art(including ‘non-object-based’ performance and sonic arts) within the ‘larger socio-materialassemblages within which they are created, circulated, and consumed.’10Where Osborne might attempt to retain the autonomy of art, maintaining its Kantianfunctionless-ness or the Adornian view of the artwork as a social totality, Born argues for deeperinvestment in the many ways in which ‘our interactions with art participate in or serve an arrayof political orientations and social and cultural processes.’11 Indeed, in the context ofcontemporaneity, which is itself a sort of historical totality—the totalisation of global(techno)social ‘times’ that constitute the present—mightn’t it be productive to understand how,as Born puts it, works of art ‘and the subjects of aesthetic experience that they elicit andencounter together live their lives’?12 To observe what Ina Blom has called the ‘art-specificproduction of sociality’ from the perspective of the present?1313 Ina Blom, ‘Mediating Sociality: A Contested Question of Contemporary Art’, in Liv Hausken ed. ThinkingMedia Aesthetics, Media Studies, Film Studies and the Arts (Oxford: Peter D Lang, 2013), p. 69. Italics inoriginal.12 Ibid, p. 2.11 Ibid, p. 5.10 Ibid.9 Born, ‘What is Social Aesthetics’, p. 2.8 Georgina Born et al., ‘What is Social Aesthetics’, p. 29.4MusicBuilding on Born, I suggest music becomes particularly useful in this regard—though notwithout complication. As a constitutive ingredient of social ordering (DeNora, 2000), music hasa unique capacity to (re)produce social unity and division on a global scale (Born andHesmondhalgh, 2000) while, at the same time, often functioning on the world market as capitalobjectified, where aesthetic content masks the underlying interests of corporations andexploitative, unsustainable, modes of production. This last point has been powerfullydemonstrated in music sociologist Kyle Devine’s recent ethnographic work on the staplecommodities that underpin music’s mediatic condition today, which encompasses a global-scalelabour force and massive carbon extraction, putting paid to any residual notions that hold musicas a particularly ‘absolute’ or immaterial art form.14As Born argues with reference to the other arts, music appears to be unique in the way itproduces sociality in a plurality of ways that operate across the globe—partly owing to itscomplex ontological status as an aesthetic phenomenon that unfolds over time. This is of coursethe case in the practice and performance of music in ‘real time’—music as activity, whatethnomusicologist Christopher Small termed ‘musicking’—but it also plays out in cultural terms.Born asks us to consider, for instance, how ‘music conjures up and animates imaginedcommunities, aggregating its listeners into virtual collectivities and publics based on musical andother identifications’.15 Riffing on Benedict Anderson’s book Imagined Communities, Born isreferring here to the powerful role music has played historically in the formation of(sub)culturally imagined communities—or scenes—such as punk, mods, various ‘hippy’movements and so on, in relation to the formation of social groups through fashion choices andother factors.16 Such formations, of course, were of central concern to the first and second waveof cultural theory coming out of what was Birmingham’s Centre for Contemporary CulturalStudies, where music featured heavily, particularly in the work of Dick Hebdige and AngelaMcRobbie.1717 Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Routledge, 1979); Angela McRobbie, Jackie16 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism(London: Verso, 2016).15 Born, ‘Music and the materialization of identities’, p. 378.14 Kyle Devine, Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019).5Temporality and scaleIn attempting to take both of these perspectives seriously, a number of tensions and inherentcontradictions arise that, I propose, might be elaborated through a consideration of ‘scale’.Cultural theorist Anna McCarthy speaks of a ‘politics of scale’, a notion she specificallyexplicates in relation to the field of cultural studies. Similarly, in a recent book anthropologistAnna Tsing argues that a pressing issue for researchers of phenomena in the context of globalcapital is to ‘scale up’ our research projects/questions without altering their intent. Of this I amnot so sure. As I see it, a scalar perspective radically alters our objects of analysis andcomplicates their unification, perhaps best exemplified in the disjunctive conjunction ofcontemporaneity itself.To think in scalar terms dramatically alters each of the concepts under consideration—of course,to conceive ‘music’ from the level of individual experience is vastly different than conceiving itfrom the geopolitical construction that is ‘the West’ or even the nation-state, for instance. But todrive the scalar perspective to more radical ends, what does it mean to conceive music from themicroscale perspective of tones and signals—the materiality of sound itself—or themicroprocesses that facilitate much of contemporary music reproduction? Is it possible toconnect microprocesses to macro considerations of broader historical temporalities andtrajectories, a complex conjunction of which the historical present is composed. Indeed, as aconcept that operates at the scale of the globe, how might contemporaneity be articulated withany semblance of regional specificity, or glimpsed within individual practices, or congealedwithin signals?The question of unifying multiscalar concepts or objects would of course be contentious in manydisciplines. It is true that one mustn’t ‘attend a panel of world system historians in the morningand chide them for the absence of “voices” in their accounts, and then criticize a panel ofethnomethodologists and microhistorians for disregarding the big picture in the afternoon.’1818 Anna McCarthy, ‘From the Ordinary to the Concrete Cultural Studies and the Politics of Scale’, p. 26.An Ideology of Adolescent Femininity… 1978.6However, as scholars who appreciate the analytical power of theoretical abstraction, and the rolethat theory occupies in social research more broadly, we should at least entertain the thoughtexperiment of attempting to connect the micro and macro in our concepts, not for the sake ofontologizing things like ‘music’ in order to define what it is. But in order to use concepts like‘music’ as tools through which to understand the conditions of the present, which is both definedby competing histories (Raymond Williams’s famous category of the ‘residual’), microprocessesthat operate beyond individual human sensibilities as well as a certain planetarity. As I have triedto suggest, music becomes particularly useful in this regard because of its ubiquity in everydaylife and because it is so intimately interconnected to all of the conditions of the present I havejust mentioned. If the future is to be remade—as this conference suggests—we must first knowthe present historically, which requires us to confront and comprehend the multiscalar conditionsthrough which it is reproduced and music can help us do this.Thank you.7

Music and contemporaneity: Temporality and scale in a globalised present

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Music and contemporaneity: Temporality and scale in a globalised present

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