Improvisation, Indeterminacy, and Ontology: Some Perspectives on Music and the Posthumanities

Abstract

In this article I address some questions concerning the emerging conjunction of musical research on improvisation and work in the ‘posthumanities’, in particular the theoretical results of the ‘ontological turn’ in the humanities. Engaging with the work of the composer John Cage, and George E. Lewis’s framing of Cage’s performative indeterminacy as a ‘Eurological’ practice that excludes ‘Afrological’ jazz improvisation, I examine how critical discourse on Cage and his conception of sound is relevant to the improvisation-posthumanities conjunction. After discussing some criticisms of ontological and materialist approaches to sound, I consider the Actor-Network Theory (ANT) of Bruno Latour, posed as offering an alternative to these approaches. Following an examination of some limitations to ANT based around the themes of critique and abstraction, I draw from the work of Gilles Deleuze and Georgina Born to suggest that work on improvisation and the posthumanities may be fruitful, but must be part of a pluralistic mode of inquiry that does not reject critique and abstraction, as some work in the posthumanities has done.

Keywords:

• Improvisation
• Indeterminacy
• Ontology
• Actor-Network Theory
• New Materialism
• Bruno Latour
• John Cage

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We might, for instance, ask about the ongoing effects of the term ‘music’ in the ‘musicology without music’ of Kyle Devine’s recent study of the political ecology of music (2019, 18), one of the most significant ANT-informed pieces of musical research in recent years.

2 For a detailed overview of ANT’s role in research into music and mediation, see Born and Barry (2018).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Iain Campbell

Iain Campbell is a Research Associate at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, University of Dundee, where he is working on the project The Future of Indeterminacy: Datification, Memory, Bio-Politics. He has written on topics across philosophy, music, sound studies, and art theory for publications including parallax, Sound Studies, and Deleuze and Guattari Studies. He received a PhD from the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Kingston University London in 2016, with a thesis exploring experimental practices of music and philosophy in the work of John Cage and Gilles Deleuze.