Musical Action

All arts, or rather, all techniques, could be regarded as a series of repeated actions of man on matter (the ultimate root of which is the stuff of nature). In order to erect a pillar, one must repeatedly displace matter, moving it from one place to another, with some sort of design, or final goal. When this final goal lies outside the action, then what we have is mere technique, whereas when it lies inside of it, we are beholding art or performance.

Think, for example, of language: at its core, language is a series of actions made by animals to shape a particular pattern of sound waves through the displacement of air molecules, that are repeated over and over and, eventually, codified with varying degrees of strictness. When language is being used as a tool for communication, as it is in animals and in everyday human life, then it is merely a technique – a method for acting upon the stuff of nature to obtain a certain external goal (namely communication). When language becomes its own end, when the beauty of it (vague as the term “beauty” might be) becomes an element of primary concern, regardless of its alignment with functionality, then we have art. Art can be a single moment, a split second decision, through which one frees themselves from the chains of technique, e.g. in choosing a particular word over another, or it can be the muse inspiring the artist to put infinite care into every stroke, as he seeks to immortalize a still life. Regardless of this, it is important to note that the ontological status of the artist, and to some extent, of the technician, is constantly renovated through these acts. Through acting upon material reality, I am first of all affirming my existence (a sort of “ago ergo sum”), and second of all entering a relationship with reality, whereby I act to shape or displace its matter. In the moment of the artistic act, my existence is defined by the action I am taking, as the identity of an actoress, in performance, is defined by their role. Not only am I in that moment an agent involved in an action, I am an agent involved in a specific action, one that is performed on the matter contained within in a certain perimeter, and on certain mediums (the natural objects through which my action is propagated, e.g. air, light, rigid bodies…), through a specific type of technique, understood as the prescriptive principle guiding the action. It is sometimes the case that the product of my action upon matter (or its abstraction, as is the case, for example, of written language) is witnessed and perceived by others, either directly or through testimony, either of the direct kind (one able to reproduce the original action with what we judge to be an appropriate level of fidelity, like a written text, or an audio recording or picture, which we believe provide us with enough information to reconstruct the actual act signified and presupposed by them in a satisfactory way) or indirect (like hearsay, or musical critique, which even at their best cannot grant us a necessary interpretation of the original act).

Our actions, therefore, have the potential to modify the material conditions of others. Through language for example, we construct our relational self, a mode of being interdependent on other beings or, on a more abstract level, members of society, and it is through these sorts of relations that our existence, our being, acquires certain characteristics. These individual ontological attributes of the relational kind are, in other words, nothing but the direct product of the matrix of social relations that emerges through the repeated use and witnessing of technique – that is, repeated action of individuals on matter. And it is these social relations exactly that determine the material conditions of a life. When a life cannot attain the standards set by these material conditions, meaning, when it finds itself outside of this matrix of social relations, in the sense that it is no longer considered a life at all, and it ceases to have ontological certainty, then alienation (in all of its forms) reveals itself. To this extent, techniques function in largely the same way, constantly perpetrating, reproducing and altering what Fanon would perhaps call a schema[1], a set of social relations that accord to each of its members a particular ontological status, and exclude certain individuals from this set delimiting the outer bounds of reality. Through the use of technique in general, and through the engagement with art especially then, what Marx, in his ‘The German Ideology’, calls “ideas” arise. Ideas in Marx are driving forces of the superstructure (the sphere of human relations), they come to be from material conditions, and they serve in maintaining or altering the status quo(the dominant ideology, or the ideal expression of material relations between individuals). It is through ideas that phantasms emerge, and one does not have to look far to see the incredible potential for both destruction and creation present in them. Sexism, racism, transphobia and homophobia, for example, are all consequences of this process of phantasmagoric construction, which supplies us with the roots of these phenomena – namely sex, gender, sexuality and race, which are able to distort our perception of reality.

This definition of phantasmagoria, Judith Butler explains in ‘Gender Trouble’, relies on repeated (and, Butler adds, stylized) actions that have matter as their object – and are, therefore, techniques. In these actions, the actor does not simply construct an identity for themselves, but also acts upon the material conditions of others, through altering the relational matrix that produces such conditions in the first place. Truly revolutionary art (as well as technique), then, is a performance, or a sequence of individual acts, deriving its goal from within or without these constituent acts, that is able to alter the status quo, or to redefine (or, more realistically, chip away at) the set of pre-existing material relations, the matrix or schema constructing individual identities and according them a specific ontological status, as well as deliberating on their grievability, or ontological certainty.

[1] Frantz Fanon: ‘Black Skins, White Masks’