Bodies and Agency: Actor Network Theory and the Ontological Challenges of Electronic Music
Unfortunately for
those who make systems, actors do not stand still for long enough to take a
group photo; boxes overlap; arrows get twisted and torn; the law seeps into
biology, which diffuses into society. No, alliances are forged not between nice
discrete parties but in a disorderly and promiscuous conflict that is horrible
to those who worship purity.[1]
While Bruno
Latour use of the word “promiscuous” in the above quotation is applied in the sense of definition A2 in
the OED, that is, “of an agent or agency: making no distinctions;
undiscriminating,”[2]
connotations of the playful and the hedonistic loom large in Latour's
subversive relish at the “horror” of “those who worship purity.”[3]
It is difficult to imagine a landscape more promiscuous, hedonistic, or
subversive than that of the Stanley Kubrick adaptation (1971) of Anthony
Burgess's A Clockwork Orange (1962) which Wendy Carlos's Moog
synthesizer soundtrack inhabits.[4]
Beyond the film's hypersexuality and “ultraviolence,” there are resonances of
the “hybrid ... amalgamation of organic and inorganic” which permutes Benjamin
Piekut's application of Actor Network Theory (ANT) to musical discourse.[5]
Carlos works within the Western canon-meets synthesiser framework of her
seminal album Switched-On Bach (1968), casting Beethoven, Rossini, and
Elgar in an uncanny, futuristic light. Carlos's realisation of Beethoven's
ninth symphony, around which the film pivots, underscores the delinquent
antihero Alex's violent debauchery, state reconditioning, and attempted suicide
in stark contrast with his passages of reverently sensual ekphrasis of it. In
crude analogy with Latour's “promiscuous” networks, the myriad actors at work
here render Beethoven not just “switched-on,” but “turned-on.” This is not just
an intertextual landscape, but the promiscuously intertextual landscape
of an ontology in which anything can be a text, including (to name but a few)
canonic music, literary source-text, Moog synthesizer, and ideology.
Rhetorics of play
permeate the discourse around ANT (and indeed many critical ontologies), in
spite of Piekut's insistence that actors are not necessarily deliberate—or even
conscious—in the differences which they make. Decoupling agency from will, he
writes that “it is an action or an event—not an intention—that manifests an
agency,” and “if something makes a
difference, then it is an actor.”[6]
Locating the points at which this ontological interplay can take place,
however, proves problematic when the vast potential scope of ANT’s approach to
research is scrutinised. As evidenced by Piekut’s “ridiculous list,” of the
agents comprising musical experimentalism: “composers, performers, audiences,
patrons, critics, journalists, scholars, venues, publications, scores,
technologies, media, a particular means of distribution, and the continuing
effects of race, gender, class, and nation,” ANT’s pursuit of empirical
encompassment is the very opposite of an analytical framework.[7]
Piekut’s suggestion that a book’s place “on the shelf next to Artaud’s Theatre and Its Double, or Watts’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,
or Cardew’s Nature Study Notes” might
affect the reader’s response to its text,[8]
ergo the difference the book makes; its agency, while a playful idea, is not
necessarily useful or illuminative. As in Lewis Carrol’s novel Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1893), it is
like a map "the scale of a mile to the mile," which “has never been
spread out yet” because it would “shut out the sunlight.”[9]
ANT’s mode of thought, taken to its logical extreme, would probably have to
concern itself with atoms, its sheer rigour obscuring insight.
Piekut attempts
to navigate this difficulty by conceiving of actor networks as “ecologies” that
have “real boundaries that mark [them] off as distinct from [their] surrounding
environment[s], but those boundaries are variable and open.”[10]
These “boundaries” of a playful, “emergent, hybrid grouping” are strikingly
reminiscent of the “virtual walls” around the “economic and ecologic rules”
conceived of by David Kanaga in his interactive, musical computer game Panoramical (2015).[11]
Drawing a comparison between the “virtual space” of free improvisation and the
“virtual space” not only laid out within the parameters of any computer game,
but physically by the constraints of technologies (be they computers or
instruments), Kanaga states that in the game, music “is the formal cause of
things.”[12]
This new division of labour, subversive in its “eras[ure of] the boundaries
between games and music,” has prompted Youtube comments on reviews of Panoramical to the effect of “this isn’t
a game.”[13]
As Kanaga suggests, “in most games […] you’re a labourer,” yet his fostered
fascination with “conceptualising how non-humans participate in the economy”
reconfigures the normative “economic and ecologic rules” within the “virtual
walls” of both game and music.[14]
Kanaga invokes Christopher Small by using the term “musicking,” suggesting that
he too conceives of music as process and action. Unlike in Small’s 1998
monograph, however, the myriad actors which do the musicking in Panoramical are not necessarily human,
prompting Adam Harper to ask, “what then, is play?”[15]
Panoramical disrupts video game mores
of agential hierarchy to such an extent that this question is largely a
rhetorical one. Within Panoramical’s
conflicted and shifting ontology between player, computer, music, image, and
more, perhaps a satisfying answer is a Latourian one: play is promiscuous.
The “physical
constraints” of computers and instruments—and indeed humans—are perhaps at
their starkest in recent performances of Iannis Xennakis’s musical “games” Duel (1959), Stratégie (1962) and Linaia
Agon (1972). In these instrumental “battles,” mathematical Game Theory is
used to develop “tactics” (the musical material) with “payoff matrices […] directing the ‘opponent’s’ choice” of musical material.[16]
This radically structured mode of improvisation was rendered virtually
unperformable in real-time because of the complexity of calculation required in
such a small space of time. In response to this challenge, IRCAM-based
trombonist and mathematician Benny Sluchen has developed a CAP (computer-aided
performance) interface, facilitating the “spontaneous execution in concert” of
the required calculations.[17]
If these matrices “direct” the “choices” of the performers, they exert
considerable agential force over the now-limited improvisational parameters.
The computer consequently executes a sort of real-time shifting score, a
mutation of the already “ontological mutant” that Lydia Goehr conceives the
musical work to be.[18]
Xennakis, Game Theory, Sluchen, the CAP, the computer, and the performers are
all constrained within the “virtual walls” of myriad “rules,” which are
mutually imposed and actors themselves within layers of “temporal arcs,” both
large- (such as the experimentalism movement) and small-scale (such as one
performance).[19]
The computer
fully crosses over into the role of performer in George E. Lewis’s Voyager (2000). Its “nonhierarchical,
interactive musical environment” sees an improviser “engage in dialogue with a computer-driven, interactive virtual
improvising orchestra” of midi sounds.[20] Lewis ascribes the computer overt agency,
describing its “logic,” “independent behaviour,” and even “empathy.”[21] Setting it aside from other computer musics by
virtue of its always-different improvisatory realisation of sofware in a
“subject-subject model of discourse, rather than a stimulus/response set-up,”
he locates Voyager's post-human “multidominant forms” of composer,
programmer, computer, and performer within a “trans-African” aesthetic, flying
in the face of the hierarchical values of trans-European culture (namely its
emphasis on the authorial intent of the composer).[22] Voyager's title carries colonial
connotations, highlighting the tension of Lewis's position as composer within
this subversive framework. He navigates this by embracing an African American
canon, which at times crosses into problematic essentialising; the homogenising
connotations of “trans-African” do not carry the same connotations as
trans-European in the Othered position which it occupies. That being said,
Lewis's approach to this embracingly formalised culture is on of collective
memory, a network of experience and solidarity.
Citing Jon Cruz's
assertion that "the production of music and other cultural forms enabled
slaves to collectively exercise symbolic control" in the mid-19th
century, Lewis implies that survival is as much a part of this African American
network as oppression is.[23] Amid this post-colonial
discourse, the “virtual walls” of musical form and computerised sound become
strikingly real; when Lewis writes that “the border between form and content is
difficult to police,” he refers back to the implications of Voyager's
title.[24] He is theorising the
“borders” of musical understanding of something which Western art music has
attempted to police, and to colonise with its reifying taxonomies. By blurring
them in each radically different performance of this piece, he subverts that
authority. As he states, there is “multidominance at the levels of both the
logical structure of the software and its performative articulation” in this
piece, and “whether or not these multidominant forms have been consciously
conceptualized, exploited and extended by artists with full awareness of their
implications, they must be viewed as culturally contingent, historically
emergent and linked to situated structures of power and dialogue.”[25] This “dialogue,” while
subversive, should not be viewed as a game, and this is because of the violent
consequences of the power structures called into question here. In spite of
Piekut's assertion that “a Latourian accounting of networks does not cover up
asymmetries, but instead issues a realist description of associations and the
hierarchies and inequalities they create,” his asserted empiricism holds a
fallacious smokescreen of objectivity before the “privileged domain” of the
analyst.[26] To map things out into
tangles of causes and effects may be conceived of as a dispassionate act, but
closes readers' ears to the long and ongoing history of silence on and
misrepresentation of oppressed minorities in the academy.
“Sound,” writes
Lewis, “becomes a carrier for history and cultural
identity” in African American musics.[27]
With the addition of a computer which also plays the role of
improviser-composer and performer, this becomes a “technologically mediated
animism,” once again post-human, and decentring the traditionally presumed human
exclusivity of agency.[28]
And yet Lewis, too, evokes the promiscuity of agency when he asks,
Rather than asking if computers can be creative and
intelligent—those qualities, again, that we seek in our mates, or at least in a
good blind date—Voyager asks us where our own creativity and
intelligence might lie—not "How do we create intelligence?" but
"How do we find it?"[29]
If Voyager is an
uncovering of latent intelligence, lying dormant, then there are myriad actors
at work that make it so. While Lewis's rejection of artist-as-creator rhetoric
is counter-cultural (at least within Western art), however, the pursuit of
creativity and intelligence which his invocation of a “blind date” deems
promiscuous is still at work—albeit relocated to a less stable position.[30]
This position is a promiscuously inter-material one: Kanaga speaks of the
“tactile” and the “vibrating” in music, Lewis of “empathy” and “communication”
through “sonic signalling.”[31]
These non-human labours, these “jobs” that are re-located into more collective
spaces are vitally contingent on the violent dehumanisation at work in A
Clockwork Orange, a film in which a woman is mechanically subjected to “the
old in-out,” and Alex is stripped of agency and rendered non-violent by the
Moog organ's uncanny rendition of a symphony he attaches so insistently to a
man—the “lovely Ludwig van.”[32]
Humans are rendered mechanical, and machines are rendered agents. Wendy Carlos,
self-reportedly reduced to a post-transition “barometer of other people's
comfort with themselves,” by living in a body rendered comfortable by what
transphobia deems surgical prosthesis, subjects the patriarchal embodiment of
Beethoven to a radical Moog technology. Agency may be a “tangle,” but in its
entanglements with identities, bodies, and technologies, it is more than a
“promiscuous” game; agents live in
grapple between power and pain, and machines cannot feel pain.
Bibliography
Appleton,
Jon. (2000). Wendy Carlos: Clockwork Orange, Sonic Seasonings, Tales
of Heaven and Hell. Computer Music Journal, 24(1), 97-98.
Bell, Arthur (May 1979). "Playboy Interview:
Wendy/Walter Carlos".Playboy (Playboy
Enterprises) 26 (5).
Burgess,
Anthony (2000). A Clockwork Orange. London: Penguin.
Carroll,
Lewis (1893). Sylvie and Bruno concluded. London: Macmillan.
Goehr,
L. (1992). The imaginary museum of musical works: An essay in the
philosophy of music. Oxford : New York: Clarendon Press ; Oxford Univ.
Press.
Harper,
Adam. 2015. 'Games Without Frontiers.' Wire no. 382 (December), pp.
16-17.
Lewis,
George E. 2000. ‘Too Many Notes: Computers, Complexity and Culture in Voyager,'
Leonardo Music Journal, vol. 10, Southern Cones: Music Out of Africa and
South America, pp. 33-39.
Lucier,
Alvin. 2012. Music 109: Notes on Experimental Music.
Piekut,
Benjamin. 2014. 'Actor Networks in Music History: Clarifications and
Critiques.' Twentieth-Century Music vol. 11, no. 2 (September), pp 191 –
215.
Sluchin,
Benny. “Linaia Agon, towards an interpretation based on the theory.”
Proceedings of Iannis Xenakis International Symposium, Athens, Greece
(2005): 299–311.
Žižek,
Slavoj, British Film Institute, FilmFour (2013). The Pervert's Guide to
Ideology. London:
Channel
4 DVD.
[1]
Latour, Pasteurization of France, 206 cited in Piekut 2014, 205.
[2]"promiscuous,
adj. and adv.". OED Online. March 2016. Oxford University Press.
http://ezproxy-prd.bodleian.ox.ac.uk:2355/view/Entry/152429?redirectedFrom=promiscuous
(accessed April 30, 2016).
[3]Latour,
Pasteurization of France, 206 cited in Piekut 2014, 205.
[4]Burgess
2000.
[5]Piekut
2014, 212.
[6]
Ibid, 195.
[7]
Ibid 198.
[8]
Ibid, 199.
[9]
Carrol 1893, 169; cited by Alex Cowan in personal correspondence with the
author, 2015.
[10]
Piekut 2014, 212.
[11]
Ibid, 212; Harper 2015, 16.
[12]
Ibid, 16.
[13]
Username: “Big Sauce” in comment thread of Saltsman, 2015.
[19]
Piekut 2014, 207.
[20]
Lewis 2000, 33.
[21]
Ibid, 33.
[22]
Ibid, 34; Ibid, 35.
[23]
Ibid, 34.
[24]
Ibid, 34.
[25]
Ibid, 35.
[26]
Piekut 2014, 211.
[27]
Lewis 2000, 37.
[28]
Ibid, 37.
[29]
Ibid, 38.
[30]
Ibid, 38.
[31]
Harper 2015, 16; ibid, 17; Lewis 2000, 33; ibid. 38.
[32]
Burgess 2000.
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