Music, time, and international political economy: making coevalness

Abstract

Recent critical studies in International Political Economy (IPE) have engaged with the ‘temporal turn’ in International Relations. However, outside of postcolonial critiques, this temporal turn in IPE has not considered how subjects share time or how coevalness is produced. This paper explores the problem of coevalness by asking how music produces shared time and plural temporalities. It analyses a collection of experimental electronic music, 4 Women No Cry, arguing that mobilising vulnerabilities through the co-presence of bodies in ‘musicking’ points towards possibilities for subjectivity beyond the individuated, sovereign, autonomous individual subject and for an intercorporeal subjectivity emerging from the intertwining of material and social relations. This article thus does not offer an ‘IPE of music’ but rather asserts, via music, a deepening of the critique of temporality and of subjectivity, opening further possibilities for political critique in IPE.

Keywords:

• Temporality
• coevalness
• music
• subjectivity
• musicking
• embodiment

Political economy has long engaged its concerns as problems in time, from questions regarding historical periodization and transition in classical political economy (Blaney & Inayatullah, 2010), to the disciplining of working bodies through the apprehension of time (Thompson, 1967), to the links between globalisation, crises, and the speed at which transactions take place (Borch, 2016; Harvey, 1989). More recently, an important body of scholarship in International Political Economy (IPE) has come to see time itself as a problem. Despite recent problematizing and profound explorations of time and temporality by IPE scholars, the field nonetheless perpetuates a scholarly disposition where it makes its objects by denying coevalness (Fabian, 2002).

As Johannes Fabian argues, the denial of coevalness, premised on the allochronic fixing and distancing of objects in time, ideologically justifies power relations between observer and observed (Fabian, 2002, p. 149). Denying coevalness reifies the bodies and subjectivities of the observed, objectifying their vulnerabilities and suffering. Politically, denying coevalness leaves the hierarchies between subjects (and their objects), such as between the ‘civilised’ and the ‘savage’, unnoticed, unremarked, and unchallenged (Blaney & Inayatullah, 2010; Younis, 2018). Sharing time, on the other hand, implies subjectification (Rancière, 1999, p. 35) through openness and sensitivity to the embodied and expressive subjects who are co-present in the making of social relations, a sensitivity that reveals an equality of subjects that is obscured by their distribution in institutional, conceptual, and political hierarchies.

However, acknowledging coevalness does not in itself challenge these hierarchies. Depicting intersubjectivity in terms of encounters between self-identical subjects, depending for their sense of subjectivity on the fictions of their autonomy and their mastery of the self and of their situations, downplays the production of subjectivity in hierarchically stratified social relations. When subjectivity is unmoored from the fantasy of the self-identical modern subject and apprehended instead as an emergent property of intercorporeal relations in complex and changing circumstances, allochronic distancing begins to unravel and in coevalness we can begin to acknowledge heterotemporality, or the plurality of times for subjects. This article examines the mobilisation of the vulnerabilities of subjects – their openness to the affects they have on each other and the field of objects in which they interact (Butler 2016) – to reveal emergent subjectivities in time and to disrupt the sensibilities on which the hierarchies ordering these subjectivities rest.

In order to obviate the political foreclosures produced by fixing subjects in allochronic time, the article hazards an ‘indisciplined’ (Rancière, 2008) approach: rather than providing a straightforward description of a conception of heterotemporal coevalness, this article confronts the temporal structures and forces that fragment and distribute bodies and sensibilities into relations of domination, with music as a chiasm or ‘flesh’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1968) that illuminates the heterotemporality of the co-production of coevalness. The article does not offer a conventional ‘IPE of music’: music here is not examined as an element of, or reflection of, or metaphor for political economic realities, nor as a commodity circulating within political economic spheres. Instead, the music analysed below is approached as a vernacular theory (Baker, 1984; Dubey, 1998; Duncan, 2000) of temporality, understood not in terms of either the formalism of Western music theory or of the commodity logic of products circulating in markets but in terms of musicking. It poses the question to IPE: in music’s co-production of shared and plural times, what political openings in subjectification can it produce?

I argue that such openings are present in ordinary practices of music and that more than a metaphor or example for what might be done in critical theories of IPE, music already presents a forceful criticism of allochronic and monotemporal dispositions through its bringing together of embodied subjects, its mobilisation of their vulnerabilities and openness, and its instantiation of the co-creation of coevalness. The article begins with a discussion of the ways that recent scholarship in IPE problematizes time and temporality while neglecting coevalness and heterotemporality. From there, it turns to a discussion of coevalness in relation to everyday life, vulnerability, and music. This discussion continues with the question of how to relate the experience of music with critique in IPE. This question is then taken up in a short methodological excursus to see how music and IPE might speak to each other beyond the disciplinary situating of music as a commodity within industrial, market, and legal controls.

The analysis that follows focuses on a musical project curated by Gudrun Gut for her label Monika Enterprise, 4 Women No Cry, which compiled independently produced electronic music made by women.¹ Gut explains that women had very little recognition in indie-electronica music and that this project was an effort to raise women artists’ profiles (Gudrun Gut, personal communication, 10 November 2016). Gut’s practices in curating, producing, and distributing this project enabled relations between artists and with listeners that exemplify the co-creation of coevalness, a ‘musicking’ that indicates what an IPE concerned with coevalness might do and what it might accomplish. The analysis focuses on how 4 Women No Cry can produce political openings through the mobilisation of vulnerabilities, the recognition of affordances, the entrainment of bodies, and the emergent properties made possible in coevalness as praxis.

The article concludes by returning to the question of how music produces heterotemporal coevalness as a possible political opening in IPE.

Time and IPE: importing the ‘temporal turn’

The denial of coevalness in IPE has its roots in both classical political economy and in social and political practice. IPE has tended to treat temporality as configurations of time rather than modes of temporal relations. Blaney and Inayatullah (2010, pp. 35–46) examine how the units of analysis in political economy are produced and distributed through series of temporal displacements that permit an epistemological separation of the subject from the object, or observer from the observed. This reproduces the problematic conceptions that Fabian identified for anthropology and ethnography, conceptions that enforce a distance between observer and observed by locating the observed in the past and the observer as temporally separate and hierarchically superior. Raymond Williams asserts that such temporal distancing is at work not only in academic disciplines but more generally behind the ways we treat cultures, institutions, and the social as given, as fixed in time. This serves to separate the social from the personal, which, as not fixed and completed, is seen in terms of experience and process (Williams, 1977, p. 128). Temporal displacements also constitute the juridically decolonised international order, reproducing racialised stratifications and hierarchies (Younis, 2018). Conceiving the international, the social, the institutional, the cultural, or the economic as fixed in the past tense suspends any understanding of them as processes open to change, permitting their separation from and priority over lived experience.

Some important recent scholarship in IPE has taken up analyses of time and temporality for political economy, sometimes intersecting and sometimes running parallel to three lines of argument that have also shaped the ‘temporal turn’ in International Relations. The first line of argument examines the spatial separation of the sovereign politics of the state from the anarchy of international relations as a temporal division (Walker, 1993, pp. 60-67). Second, temporality can be considered in terms of an orientation in time, where the past or the future shapes the processes and events under consideration. Third, there is a question of whether time is a single thing (monotemporality) or if it is plural (heterotemporality).

There has been rather less explicit engagement in this literature with the problematic of allochronic time and coevalness; Hindess (2007), Blaney and Inayatullah (2010), and Vij (2012; 2016) are important exceptions. While recent scholarship in IPE has made valuable contributions through its interventions in the first two lines of argument, regarding temporal divisions and orientations in time, the tendency not to engage with the problems of coevalness has tended to produce monotemporal and allochronic analyses. Postcolonial theory has been scathing in its critiques of the monotemporal and allochronic assumptions supporting the hegemony of the assertion of capitalist Western culture as ‘advanced’ and as an inevitable outcome of a unilinear historical development through its view of other cultures as belonging to capitalism’s past (Chakrabarty, 2000; Tomba, 2013) or in its one-sided, ‘stagist’ accounts of capital and modernity (Chatterjee, 2001; Sanyal, 2007; Harootunian, 2015).

There is a strong link between the denial of coevalness, especially when premised on monotemporality, and the political premises of modern subjectivity. This modern notion of subjectivity refers to the givenness of the capacity to decide and act in terms of the subject’s individuation, its autonomy, its security, and its mastery over itself and its circumstances (Dean, 2016). The concrete materiality of the subject as a body in relation to other bodies, and the vulnerabilities and suffering that makes this relating the condition for deciding and acting – in effect, the way bodies must share time – is also denied by this modern, sovereign conception of subjectivity. In its explorations of the problems of temporality, IPE has tended to leave this modern conception of the subject unaddressed, denying coevalness by neglecting the co-presence of bodies in time.

Regarding the first line of argument, to appreciate the spatial separation of anarchic international relations versus sovereign politics (or state system versus states) as a temporal division, the international may be understood in terms of what Kristeva, following Nietzsche, called monumental time, ‘which englobes these supranational, sociocultural ensembles within even larger entities’ (Kristeva, 1981, p. 14). Monumental time expresses the relentless passing of time, the time of chronos (Hutchings, 2016). Monumental time freezes alterity into the past (Neumann, 2018). The obverse of the chronos of the international system is kairos (Hutchings, 2016), a time of decision and action akin to Kristeva’s (and Nietzsche’s) ‘cursive time’ (Kristeva, 1981, p. 14).

Economic analyses that focus on structures tend to assert time itself as the agent of change in international, world, or globalising systems. This hierarchically distributes monumental time as the time of the international while cursive time is confined to instrumentally sovereign state spaces. Critique in these accounts emerges from demonstrating how temporal problems in political economy function to determine the conditions for subjectivity, policing the subject by shaping how and where it can act. Change is exogenous (an ‘even larger entity’), or a result of shocks originating outside the system; the system itself is a given, natural state of affairs.²

Monumentalising time fixes the conditions for deciding and acting in instrumental terms. Fixing the temporal limits of a phenomenon or an event allows it to be situated in allochronic time and secures the conditions for subjective decision and action, regardless of the speed of events.³ Such fixing reproduces in temporality the spatial separation of politics from an anarchic international system and containing it within the sovereign state, referring the political to the state and regulating it by the state. This temporal/spatial distribution of political subjectivity in monumental time denies coevalness by reducing the conditions for deciding and acting to the individualised sovereign subject.

When IPE focuses on time as monumental, it recalls Fabian’s concern with anthropology’s deploying of allochronic time. For Fabian, allochronic time appears as a homogeneous, teleological flow and in it, different people (or peoples) occupy different places along its line. The ethnographer who writes in allochronic time secures access to the differences emerging from encounters with others by occupying, measuring, and allotting time (Fabian, 2002, p. 144), denying coevalness by creating temporal distance between different forms of consciousness. Theory and analysis in IPE need not set out to provide practical policy advice nor be concerned to ‘correct’ the behaviours of ‘less developed’ actors – the allochronic disposition critiqued by Hindess (2007) and by Blaney and Inayatullah (2010) – but, as Sammam’s (2015), Borch’s (2016), and Grabham’s (2016) critiques demonstrate, monumental time nonetheless accounts for the time of subjects within englobing temporal contexts: coevalness is denied by fixing time and subjectivity in a teleological, homogeneous, and monumental temporality that proceeds without regard to the bodies situated in relation to it or to each other.

If the denial of coevalness haunts the critiques of temporality as context (chronos), does it also shape the critique of the time of decision and action (kairos)? One way to focus on the capacity to decide and act is to consider the subject’s orientation in time (Hutchings, 2011). Recent scholarship in IPE has also made important contributions to this second line of argument. Historically orientated research that looks at the present as a condensation of forces seeded in the past delimits the range of actions for the subject; traces of the past reside in the present and shape path dependant courses and options. Contrarily, a different orientation brings the future into the present, in terms, for example, of a ‘future perfect’ or the ‘will have been’ (Kristeva, 1981), of premediation (Grusin, 2010), or of prefigurative politics (‘be the change you want to see’, as in Jeffrey & Dyson, 2016). Accounts based on material forces tend to see change as rooted in events and processes from the past; accounts based on ideas tend to see pathways for change as creatively emerging from the present (Hay, 2004). Basing explanations on orientation in time does not necessarily distribute subjects in allochronic time. Nevertheless, it tends to treat temporality subjectively in strategic terms. Even when neoliberal subjectivity is the focus of critique, subjectivity is conceived through an instrumental engagement with time, denying coevalness by understanding subjectivity in its pursuit of autonomy and mastery rather than in its emergence through relations with other materially embodied subjects. For example, the market in derivatives makes capital’s time and space both changeable yet carefully and strategically managed; that is, in market behaviour temporality is a strategic resource subjected to the virtù of the trader.

In an important critique of the effects of temporal orientation towards the past, Montgomerie and Büdenbender (2015) look to everyday life as an object for financialization and as an analytical perspective to critique financialization. They note how the temporal orientation towards the past 30 years, when first-time buyers were able to get onto the housing ladder relatively young and count on steady increases in the values of their property, does not apply to the present when these conditions no longer pertain. However, this kind of orientation towards the past is not mere misperception: policies orientated by this understanding of the past amount to strategic denials of the temporalities of the present. By implication, Montgomerie and Büdenbender demonstrate how through these strategic denials, as with the fixing of the conditions for deciding and acting in monumental time to reduce subjectivity by individualising it, financialization in housing policy fragments and distributes bodies into hierarchies through which financial agents and policy makers subordinate the possibilities for everyday life to the requirements of financial accumulation. Financialization forecloses the political by containing the everyday, just as monumental time forecloses the political by containing it within the state.

Future orientations in time can also express an instrumental subjectivity. In shadow banking, ‘[location], ownership and valuation attributes become more fungible and mobile. Timing becomes strategic, as well as just linear, and it is by these transformational practices that tax arbitrage becomes readily achievable’ (Bryan et al., 2016, p. 947). Similarly, timing is strategic in the constitution of stock markets, where ‘…the temporal character of situations shapes strategies of orientation towards sources of information’ (Larson, 2010, p. 481). The logic of derivatives emerging from financial markets and shaping contemporary practices of risk and security makes the future present in the absence of path-dependent forms of predictability (Anderson, 2010; Amoore, 2013; Amoore & de Goede, 2008; de Goede, 2012). Denial of coevalness does not rest on an orientation towards the past or the future as determining the possibilities for action; rather, it emerges from the ways that IPE focuses on the instrumental strategic interest of sovereign, self-identical subjects – borrowers, investors, policy makers.⁴

IPE does not always attribute instrumentality to temporal orientation. The notion of crisis, for example, is shaped by temporal ambiguities (Sammam, 2015, p. 969).⁵ Nevertheless, the field reproduces a strategic approach to subjectivity in times of crisis. A temporal orientation towards the future, for example, can define a structural predisposition to pro-cyclical investment practices, which in turn tend to produce financial crises (Palan, 2015). In contrast to ‘disciplinary fiscal consolidation’, in which the future is understood to be fixed and impinging on the capacity of the state to spend, Stanley (2016) takes up Anderson’s (2010) notion of anticipatory action to show how the Conservative government in the UK used ‘anticipatory fiscal consolidation’ as a governmental practice and logic to prevent vague and indeterminate future threats. In this analysis, ‘crisis’ is less a moment of contingency and more a tactical performance of expectations management.

Examinations of time and temporality in IPE have explored the importance of temporality in market creation and operations, in banking and finance, in valuation, and in the capacities and dispositions of actors to respond to disruptions and crises. However, regarding the third line of argument, the field has tended not to address problems resulting from monotemporal and allochronic accounts of time because of the assumptions about subjectivity that its critiques rest on. Larson’s (2010) study is emblematic of this. His empirical material is a comparative study of the creation of stock markets in Fiji, Ghana, and Iceland. A plurality of temporalities lies at the heart of this research, but each case is treated monotemporally. Larson breaks time into elements that constitute temporal structures, which can then be compared: elements like cycles, trajectories, pace, and duration. Social formations exhibit differing temporalities but national cultures are containers for these differences, reproducing the first problem of inscribing cursive time spatially within the sovereign territorial units subsumed by the international.

Against monotemporality, Hutchings (2016; 2018) argues for an ethical approach based on heterotemporality. The latter approach foregrounds forms of political struggle: Chatterjee (2001), for example, seeks the progressive potential of the nation in its heterogeneous time. Conceptualising heterotemporality is not without its difficulties, however. For example, Tomba (2013) examines the non-linear, plural conceptions of time in Marx’s later writings. He invokes the idea of ‘strata’ – a geological, spatial metaphor – to describe the relations between co-present temporalities that capital synchronizes under a dominant temporality of necessary labour time. Against a conventional rendering of the formal and real subsumption of labour or of relative and absolute surplus value as belonging to stages of capitalist development, for Tomba capitalist markets work to synchronize these as different temporalities. The spatial metaphor is interesting, as it suggests political possibilities emerging from ‘frictions’ between different strata, but it also approaches the present moment from a synchronic axis: it takes the present moment out of time in order to subsume it under the monumental time of capital. A dis-placed (to the structural level) monotemporal view of capital’s dominance is assumed. Further, as Osborne (2015, pp. 46–47) notes, in Tomba’s understanding of plural temporalities as articulated in a structure by market synchronization, political acts take place within different temporalities, rather than being productive of their own temporalities. Coevalness is denied.

IPE has tended to articulate the controversies that surround its objects – such as accumulation, crises, markets, banks, and finance – as concerns about how to place these objects in relation to time, not about how material bodies share time. The field responds to discourses of time rather than to the politics that a ‘temporal turn’ could enact (Chamon, 2018). Outside of the postcolonial critiques discussed above, the problematic of allochronic versus coeval time rarely comes up. Thus, the coloniality of intersubjective relations (Vij, 2012) is also generally neglected in IPE because its account of subjectivity has tended to be modern and sovereign and its account of temporality has tended to be monotemporal and allochronic: time appears as external to the bodies that live it, it is the time in which the objects and subjects of IPE’s critiques are situated.

The problem of coevalness

…coevalness is a mode of temporal relations. It cannot be defined as a thing or state with certain properties. It is not ‘there’ and cannot be put there; it must be created or at least approached. As an epistemological condition it can only be inferred from results, i.e. from the different ways in which recognition or denial of coevalness inform anthropological theory and writing. (Fabian, 2002, p. 34)

The notion of coevalness comes out of the recognition that subjects must share time if they are to communicate. However, researchers cannot merely deploy coevalness as an alternative conception of temporality to allochronic time. Coevalness must be made in practice. Therefore, coeval time is not necessarily innocent of problematic accounts of, and encounters with, alterity.⁶ For Vij, a mere reversal of the unevenness of allochronic time to assert coevalness, such as may be found in claims regarding multiculturalism, reproduces a problematic understanding of cultures as containers of identity (Vij, 2012, p. 5). Politically, such an approach to alterity replaces difference generated in the Orientalist gaze with self-absorbed indifference (Vij, 2012, p. 4). Such outcomes, in Vij’s argument, belie the radically progressive gesture behind assertions of equality in coevalness. To claim to be coeval with the Other, in other words, can rest on a neglect of the structural inequalities generated by capitalist development: coevalness becomes the luxury and privilege of the ‘high end urban consumption’ of exotic films, fashion, and food (Vij 2012, p. 20).

These critiques of coevalness are compelling. Vij’s examination of the complex temporal determinations of subjective positions – which, through her discussion of Karatani (2008), she describes as Borromean rings of capital, nation, and state – shows that coeval temporality cannot be assumed to rest on intersubjective relations between equals. However, it is also not immediately clear that recognising heterotemporality addresses this problem. For Stefan Helgesson (2014), an antinomy arises between Fabian’s notion of coevalness and Chakrabarty’s heterotemporality. In Helgesson’s construction, coevalness appears as an assertion of a singular Time shared by both parties. Heterotemporality, in contrast, asserts multiple times but, in Helgesson’s view, reduces temporal differences to cultural difference: to each culture its time, a gesture that, he argues, lent itself to more vicious ends as apartheid.

As Osborne notes, however, coevalness is not necessarily a singular Time: ‘Fabian registers the co-existence of different temporalities, without either reducing them to a con-temporaneous present or removing them from time altogether. Times which are coeval co-exist chronologically in a way which is … productive of further complex temporalities’ (Osborne, 1995, p. 28). The relation between coevalness and heterotemporality need not be seen as an antinomy; rather, they may indicate analytically intersecting axes. So, the allochronic placing of the other as if belonging to a Western past is a monotemporal allochronic account; the identification of different temporalities with cultures (as in Larson, 2010) acknowledges a plural temporality but is allochronic. The antimony in coevalness that Helgesson critiques is that in coevalness, Time appears to be singular or monotemporal. However, I argue below that musicking produces a heterotemporal coevalness as a matter of its everyday vernacular practices. Helgesson’s ‘heterochronic’ solution to the antinomy between the ‘Fabian option’ and the ‘Chakrabarty option’ tends in this same direction: recalling the multiple temporalities determining the everyday in Lefebvre (2004), he notes that experience is never fully under the hegemony of dominant versions of time, rather everydayness is constituted polyrhythmically, in complex and sometimes conflicting rhythms.

For Fabian, the problem lies in the distribution of subjects in allochronic time: allochronic time is central to the givenness of practices of domination. The artificiality of the separations between the social, cultural, or institutional and the personal, as critiqued by Williams (1977), enables domination: domination must be produced. Consequently, the conditions for overcoming domination must also be produced. Fabian asserts:

To recognize Intersubjective Time would seem to preclude any sort of distancing almost by definition. After all, phenomenologists tried to demonstrate with their analyses that social interaction presupposes intersubjectivity, which in turn is inconceivable without assuming that the participants involved are coeval, i.e. share the same Time. In fact, further conclusions can be drawn from this basic postulate to the point of realizing that for human communication to occur, coevalness has to be created. Communication is, ultimately, about creating shared Time. (Fabian, 2002, pp. 30-31; emphasis in original)

Furthermore, allochronic time does not displace ‘mere’ concepts: in temporal displacement, ‘the dominant body ignores its co-presence with others and then displaces them into a different developmental time’ (Blaney & Inayatullah, 2010, p. 200). The intersubjective communication that Fabian takes up from phenomenology as necessary for the creation of coevalness is grounded in intercorporeality (Merleau-Ponty, 1968, pp. 141–143; Davies & Chisholm, 2018, pp. 280–281). In his later work, Merleau-Ponty recasts subjectivity in terms of ‘chiasm’ or as ‘flesh’, emerging from bodies’ interactions and entanglements with social, technical, and environmental contexts. Against modern, sovereign understandings of subjectivity conceived as separated from or prior to bodily engagements, subjectivity becomes a practice of what Judith Butler describes as vulnerability:

[Vulnerability] … characterizes a relation to a field of objects, forces, and passions that impinge on or affect us in some way. As a way of being related to what is not me and not fully masterable, vulnerability is a kind of relationship that belongs to that ambiguous region in which receptivity and responsiveness are not clearly separable from one another, and not distinguished as separate moments in a sequence. (Butler, 2016, p. 25)

The problem of coevalness, then, is in part a problem of how to understand and respond to vulnerability. As Vij shows, identifying the binary of allochronic/coeval with that of dominant/resistant prevents analysis from engaging the practices of domination that can mobilise coevalness (Vij, 2012, p. 5). These binaries simply shore up the temporal walls that guard against recognising vulnerability. However, if critique in IPE is constrained by the habitual or unconsidered dominant practices that characterise allochronic time, then creating coevalness enables the possibility of mobilising vulnerability in the critique of these constraints, especially where mobilising vulnerability acknowledges subjects as bodies.

For IPE, mobilising vulnerability will mean recognising and engaging with the ways that Blaney and Inayatullah’s ‘savage’ – or, in Butler’s (2016, p. 25) terms, what is ‘not me and not fully masterable’ – is always already co-present in the field and in the discipline. Rather than distributing IPE’s objects for analysis – accumulation, markets, banks, finance, for example – into configurations of time, mobilising vulnerability foregrounds bodies as they share time in relation to these objects. As Butler asserts, we must ‘…understand the bodily dimensions of action, what the body requires, and what the body can do, especially when we must think about bodies together, what holds them there, their conditions of persistence and power’ (cited in Weitzel, 2019, p. 208). This brings the coloniality of intersubjective relations (Vij, 2012) under critique, because what is ‘not fully masterable’ is the intercorporeal subjectivation that expresses the fundamental equality of the subjects (Rancière, 1999, pp. 34-35) that are inserted into relations of domination and subordination. Butler’s conception of vulnerability draws our attention to ordinary embodied practices of coevalness and heterotemporality where, as C.L.R. James asserted, subjects do not need experts to tell them how to speak or what to say (cited in Gilroy, 1993, p. 79).

Approaching coevalness musically

Time and temporality are central to music. When conceived of as products, songs, or musical ‘pieces’ or ‘works’, music appears to the listener as sounds organised and mobilised in time. For example, a melody might be described in terms of its expression in pitches, tones, rhythms, meter, measure, or tempo. Understanding music as an aesthetic or artistic form, or, for political economy, as a commodity abstracted from its performance and enjoyment, became possible through the development of ‘technologies of memory’ (Cutler, 2020) such as sound recording as well as through the development of capitalist markets for music (Attali, 1985). Approaching music in these reified, formal terms – abstracting organised sounds from the social, cultural, or political economic relations in which they are produced, distributed, and consumed – echoes the allochronic denial of coevalness, such as where music theory analyses musical traditions outside of the ‘the harmonic style of Eighteenth-Century European musicians’ (Neely 2020) in allochronic terms - that is, in terms of how they relate to Western musical forms.

There is a rich body of work studying the International Political Economy of music, that is, examining the production and consumption of music in relation to structures, institutions or practices of political economy (notably Adorno, 1938 [2002]; and also Attali, 1985; Cutler 2020; Guilbault & Rommen, 2019; for example), or in relation to poltical mobiliszation (again, for example, Massad, 2003; or Weitzel, 2019). A different approach examines music as a critical stance or practice of political economy (Gilroy, 1993; Shapiro, 2004; Franklin, 2005; Dunn, 2016; Inayatullah, 2016; Franklin, 2022). Against the allochronic disposition towards temporality, this latter approach allows us to ask: how can coevalness be produced in music?

The term ‘musicking’ – treating music as a verb, not a noun – was coined by the musicologist Christopher Small (1998) to address the limitations in more formalistic music theory. The notion of musicking provides crucial methodological suggestions for understanding the embodied co-creation of coevalness. Small wanted to broaden the range of what we understand by ‘music’ beyond the reified notion of a ‘piece of music’ to the wider sets of relations not only between organised sounds but also between sound and people and between bodies: thus, including composing, performing, listening, dancing, and all that goes into these. From this perspective, music is a ‘…distributed materiality. Its multiple simultaneous forms of existence –as sonic trace, discursive exegesis, notated score, technological prosthesis, social and embodied performance – indicate the necessity of conceiving of the musical object as a constellation of mediations’ (Born, 2011, p. 377).

Musicking stages precisely the sort of encounter ‘where receptivity and responsiveness become the basis for mobilizing vulnerability rather than engaging in its destructive denial’ (Butler, 2016, p. 25). Musicking affords the possibility of mobilizing vulnerability and openness in the instantiating of the co-creation of coevalness. Music, alongside politics, is a co-constituted domain of action (Franklin, 2005, p. 6). Musicking implies perceiving music and time as co-created, underscoring the wider social relations and entanglements that partition and distribute the sensible through sound. Musicking grounds analysis in the concrete actions of people (Moreno & Steingo, 2012), not only in the relations between the organised sounds conventionally conceived as musical but also as part of the ‘intertwined histories of organism and environment basic to biocultural coevolution’ (Tomlinson, 2015, p. 144).

Musicking produces coevalness through mediations and embodied relations. For example, Gallagher and Prior (2014, p. 276) assert that headphones, ‘…can have the effect of contracting or collapsing the space between subject and object’. This suggests that listening to music in headphones is a social and not necessarily solitary experience, as headphones bring performer and listener into a proximate relationship. Not only headphones as mediations can occasion this collapsing: the embodied politics of music also emerge through other mediations, such as dance (Åhäll, 2016; Rösch, 2018). Music’s collapsing of the distance between subject and object mitigates the epistemological distancing of subject from object that Blaney and Inayatullah place at the heart of allochronic hierarchies (2010, pp. 35-46).

Coevalness in musicking is also heterotemporal: the temporalities of the musician and the listener are shared but not the same. Recorded music can be played in different times and places, in different sonic, spatial, and temporal contexts, and can be shared with other listeners. Collapsing this space between subjects and objects produces proximate rhythmic and temporal relations between the artists and the listeners, producing shared time despite the spatial and temporal separations that we might assume are fixed by recording music or listening through headphones. The mobility of recordings, not only from producer to listener but also across the different spaces and times of listening, resists the monumentalising of time. Contracting and collapsing this space brings the moments mobilising responsiveness and receptivity between musicians and listening subjects more clearly into focus.

To understand musicking as a form of critique that can produce coevalness and new, manifold temporalities, we can consider the origins of the human capacity for musicking in the biocultural coevolution of hominins and their environments. Tomlinson (2015) looks to the environmental affordances that produce the chances for such capacities to develop, the entrainment of social action and coordination in rhythms, and the emergence of novel properties that come from the combinations of given materials. Each of these – affordances, entrainment, and emergences – illuminates the chiasm or vulnerability of the body and its space and each can also be analysed in music’s soundscapes.

The soundscape, for example, deploys information, tasks, and responses afforded to organisms negotiating with their environments. We manage these soundscapes and deployments through ‘expectation, fulfilment or its absence, and affective arousal’ (Tomlinson, 2015, p. 144). Soundscapes are intertwined material and social environments, as recognised, for example, by acoustic design in architecture and urban planning (LaBelle, 2010). A notable example of this intertwining is in the placement of music in retail spaces; as DeNora shows, music’s affective power at the scale of the body, as in an aerobics class or in an intimate setting, can be deployed in a public setting such as a high street shop to shape and influence consumer choices and behaviours (DeNora, 2000).⁷

Moreover, the management of these affordances is foundational to social relations through the ‘positive feedback between hominin brains and the contexts they created of proximity, mimesis, and growing mindreading skills. More succinctly, the taskscapes reflect the neural consequences of action sequences in social alliance’ (Tomlinson, 2015, p. 137, emphasis in original). The coordination of these action sequences produces a ‘rhythmicization of brains, bodies, and hands inscribing the world and giving dimensions of space and time to daily life’ (Tomlinson, 2015, p. 69), or their entrainment.

Entrainment begins to bridge music and affect, opening a pathway towards producing social explanations of physical and biological phenomena (Brennan, 2004, as cited in Born, 2011, p. 384). However, to avoid a reductive conception that cannot account for the co-production of coevalness, a third quality of musicking must also be stressed. Recalling Williams’ discussion of cultural forms that emerge from new practices of domination and subordination (Williams, 1977, pp. 121-127), emergence describes the joining together of ‘discrete elements so as to reveal new properties’ (Tomlinson, 2015, p. 156). Joining together discrete times in coevalness affords the emergence of new, complex temporalities (Osborne, 1995, p. 28). These three concepts – affordance, entrainment, and emergence – provide methodological guides for the analysis of musicking as the production of coeval time and of the polyrhythms, eurythmia, and arrythmia in the plural temporalities of embodied subjects (Lefebvre, 2004).

Coevalness in the soundscape: 4 women no cry

The co-creation of shared time in 4 Women No Cry depends on the equality of musicking subjects. This is an equality that can disrupt the givenness of perceived hierarchies – for example, of gender – that capital, nation, and state articulate and reproduce. Such a conception of subjectivity (one that no longer denies the body, nor denies coevalness, nor denies heterotemporality) can help IPE respond to the fixing of subjectivity within the Borromean rings that Karatani and Vij critique.

Gudrun Gut compiled the music on 4 Women No Cry for her Berlin-based label, Monika Enterprise on three CDs released in 2005, 2006, and 2008. My iTunes app categorises them under the ‘electronica’ genre although there is a wide range of genres included, from pop and indie songs to more atmospheric electronic music. The artists produced the music on computers, independently of commercial studios. Tracks were sent to Gut on recordable CDs or as mp3 files.⁸

Volume 1 (Gut, 2005) included the following artists from their respective cities:

• Rosario Bléfari (Buenos Aires)

• Tusia Beridze (Tblisi)

• Èglantine Gouzy (Paris)

• Catarina Pratter (Vienna)

Gut released Volume 2 in 2006:

• Dorit Chrysler (New York and Austria)

• Mico (London and Japan)

• Monotekktoni (Berlin)

• Iris (Barcelona)

And Volume 3 in 2008:

• The Sound of Lucrecia (Pereira, Colombia)

• Manekinekod (Athens)

• Julia Holter (Los Angeles)

• Liz Christine (Rio de Janeiro)

4 Women No Cry circulates through capitalist markets under the compulsion to accumulate, regulated by the laws that govern the circulation of cultural products. Such markets are a monumental temporality that, as Tomba (2013) argued, can synchronise the temporalities that they subsume. Nevertheless, 4 Women No Cry decentres the subjectivity of capital by developing the production relations among the direct producers of the music, including the listeners; it decentres national identification by foregrounding the cities in which the music was produced, emphasising the intertwining of the flows between them rather than the boundaries separating them; and it decentres the sovereign subject by mocking notions of mastery and by mobilising receptivity and responsiveness in heteronomous relations between the artists and between artists and listeners.

The monumental time of capitalist markets, in complex relations with the monumental times of the nation and of the state, synchronise the temporalities they subsume; all three work together to spatialise time. This spatialisation, which, as argued above, sets out to fix other temporalities allochronically, can be disrupted in the practices of cursive times. Many of the tracks on 4 Women No Cry involve explicit external spatial settings (e.g. Liz Christine, Rosario Bléfari, Julia Holter). Consider, for example, Liz Christine’s (2008a) use of recorded animal sounds, such as the frogs in ‘The Blue Frog and the Green Fairy’ or the purring cats, barking dogs, and bleating lambs in ‘Dreaming’, alongside Rosario Bléfari’s (2005) use of street sounds: the latter’s track ‘Vidriera Chilena’ opens with a broken piano, a passing motorcycle, birdsong, and pouring water, against which a piano melody begins along with a drum break, glockenspiel, synthesizers. The motorcycle in ‘Vidriera Chilena’ brings a sensation of movement in urban space into the soundscape. Julia Holter (2008) similarly uses the sounds of coyotes crying in ‘Coyotes of the Canyon’. Each song uses musique concrète or field music techniques that explicitly place the listener into an external soundscape. Like the animal sounds in Liz Christine’s and Julia Holter’s compositions, street sounds are affordances; they become instruments in the music, playing on the same expectations of melodic development and rhythm as pianos and drums, and providing mediations that connect disparate subjects, bodies, and cursive times of the composers and listeners. In contrast with the spatialisation of monumental time that places musician and listener into distinct and segregated roles and identities (consumer or producer; in one country or another country; uses regulated by laws governing cultural and intellectual property), the playful and personal soundscapes of these tracks invite listeners to share the spaces of the soundscapes and hear their own environments musically.

The same logic is at work in Dorit Chrysler’s (2006) contributions. For example, ‘Animoso’ opens with synthesizers, voice, Theremin, and wind chimes before drums come in to articulate a rhythmic structure. Chrysler is known for her use of the Theremin and the instrument merits some attention in this context. The Theremin generates sound through an oscillator that is controlled by two antennae: one that affects the pitch and the other volume. These antennae are sensitive to the proximity of the player’s body: the antennae respond to hand (and other) gestures moving closer to or further from them. Hearing a Theremin involves the listener in the specific body movements of the player in ways that might be taken much more for granted for a singer or violinist. The Theremin brings her body into Dorit Chrysler’s compositions just as the rhythmic handclaps in the opening of The Sound of Lucrecia’s (Dalt, 2008) ‘De Vez En Cuando’ make the presence of her body felt by the listener in this shared time, just as the motorcycle brings urban space to the listener through Rosario Bléfari’s song.

Interestingly, the virtuosity of the musicians also becomes an element of the production of coevalness in some of these songs: composition and performance are crafts. Two songs make this point explicitly: Catarina Pratter’s (2005) ‘Dreamin Of Love’ and Tusia Beridze’s (2005) ‘Late’. ‘Dreamin Of Love’ opens on a low-pitched oscillator riff with voices singing about ‘love, dreamin of love, feeling…’. The song begins with synthesizers and some looped manipulated voices. Midway through, however, the song stutters to a stop and in the break, the singer makes a raspberry and curses before the song resumes: a mistake that draws attention to the craft of the song. Similarly, Tusia Beridze’s electronic piece contains a brief comment in voice reminding her to ‘record this bit again’.

These gestures subvert the assumption of mastery on the part of the musicians. By leaving the work of crafting the pieces in the tracks, not only do Pratter and Beridze mobilise their vulnerabilities in relation to the listener, but they also assert a form of subjectivity that does not depend on fantasies of autonomy or mastery. As tracks on albums that circulate in markets, the songs are commodities and entail forms of subjectification inherent in anonymised, distanced, and objectified social relations between sellers and purchasers of labour power; in this regard, at least, the songs on 4 Women No Cry are no different from any other song for sale on global music markets. However, leaving the ‘mistakes’ in the songs, drawing attention to their craft, affords a different kind of social relation, in which the subjectivity and subjectification of the producers (performer and listener) emerge from mutual recognition in shared, plural times. Drawing attention to the craft focuses the experience of the songs as products of working bodies, where work becomes a form of apprehending intercorporeality between listener and artist. The production relations between musician and listener become relations between equals.

Through these complex mediations in each of these songs, bodies are entrained. There is a playful, embodied, intercorporeal connection between musician and listener that cannot be reduced to the relation between an active producer and a passive consumer as figures in a capitalist market. Instead of the destructive denial of vulnerability (Butler 2016) in monumental time, the shared time of musician and listener produces new subjective possibilities that open further temporal and subjective possibilities in other musicking.

The presence of the world, of bodies, and of craft in these songs matters because it helps clarify what vulnerability might do in listening to this music. The uses of these kinds of sounds in their songs provide affordances and entrainments in the soundscape: they are forces or opportunities in the sound for listeners to coordinate their musical expectations with the sounds provided by the artist. The songs on 4 Women No Cry collapse the space and the time between artists and listeners, producing an experience of intercorporeality, not because they establish any personal relationships between the musicians and listeners but because they frame mediations in which subjects – specifically, bodies – can share different times and temporalities (Bruff, 2021).

If the musician is understood to be crafting a soundscape, listeners negotiate that soundscape with their own musical dispositions: with expectations about what music is supposed to do and sound like, with affective investments and responses. The soundscape provided by the musician produces a provisional partition and distribution of the sensible (following Rancière), which the listener reproduces and modifies. The soundscape, on these terms, affords temporal coevalness as artist and listener each bring their kairos, their orientations towards past experiences and future expectations about the feelings that the music produces, and the contingencies of the mobilised vulnerabilities of the artist and the listener that promote (or prevent) cognitive understandings and affective entrainments.

We have already seen how this crafting of a co-presence in a soundscape occurs in the contributions of Liz Christine, Rosario Bléfari, and Julia Holter to 4 Women No Cry, for whom urban and natural environments worked into musical forms create spatial and temporal co-presence. Lucrecia Dalt and Dorit Chrysler make their bodies feel present in the music and entrain their listeners’ bodies with their own. Liz Christine and Manekinekod (2008) also deploy samples from movies and soundtracks to produce a shared cultural environment. Monotektoni (2006) makes use of ambient sound and mood. In each case, the roles of musician and listener are not rigidly distinguished: in composing their pieces, each musician is listening to her environment, bringing sounds into the recording from her experience, making her aural environment sensible and distributing that sensibility through these recordings in forms that both welcome and challenge the sensibility of the listener – fulfilling and frustrating the listener’s musical expectations and dispositions.

The social relations of the music on 4 Women No Cry are not just those between listeners and musicians; they also include the manifest relations between the artists included in the discs. There is an important if obvious way that these relations are conventionally international relations, adding nation and state to capital in Karatani’s model of Borromean rings: the musicians are all identified as coming from cities in different countries. In shaping the subjective possibilities of the musicians, geopolitical borders may matter for the music, affecting the ability of the women to move or their decisions on where to live or where they can perform. They can also affect the music in more conventionally political economic ways as questions come up regarding who has the resources to listen to or produce this music, or in terms of questions concerning copyright or royalty payments. However, despite the diversity of the music in the compilations, the musicians are linked not only through its generic description as electronic music but also in the influences shared among and between the different artists, indicating links and flows between their respective cities: Thus, their social relations are also international in a non-conventional sense, in that they are not reducible to national identities. The songs are not examples of German music, or Georgian music, or Brazilian music. The geographic distributions of the musicians already articulate an intertwined space distinct from the geopolitical spaces reducible to bordered sovereign national territories.

The community of musicians articulated by Gudrun Gut by compiling these CDs has yielded further multiple modes of co-presence in her subsequent project, Monika Werkstatt (2018). Many of the women who appeared on the 4 Women No Cry compilations also contribute to this project. Monika Werkstatt began in 2015 and incorporates workshops and masterclasses as well as performances by the artists. These usually begin with talks, where the women in the project discuss the work that goes into producing the music. This aspect of the workshop puts interaction with the audience into the foreground. Gut notes how these kinds of conversation are in fact quite rare, even among the artists, and that they go a long way to underscoring how producing this music is hard work, sweat and effort (Gudrun Gut, personal communication, 10 November 2016). The talks are followed by performances by the artists and sometimes improvisation and collective compositions, which are then reworked by the artists in the studio (Monika Werkstatt 2016).

If we consider these projects in the framework elaborated by Jacques Attali (1985) for a political economy of music, these efforts indicate pathways leading away from a contemporary dominant mode of engaging with music – Attali describes it as ‘repeating’, premised on strict divisions of labour between musicians, forms of distribution, and listeners and a fragmenting of time between socially necessary work-time and the leisure time of consumption or use – and towards the less defined emergent mode of musicking, which he calls ‘composition’. Monika Werkstatt not only exemplifies Attali’s ‘composition’, it also explores the emergent forms of exchange suggested by Karatani and produces new, emergent temporalities. The extension of the kinds of coevalness exemplified in 4 Women No Cry into explicit modes of temporal co-presence in Monika Werkstatt – in the musicians’ live interactions with audiences, with each other in retreats, and then again with each other and audiences after reworking the materials generated in these earlier interactions – signals the transformations of the social relations of the production of music that creating coevalness affords.

Conclusions

Critical studies in IPE investigating time and temporality have opened new theoretical avenues, shedding new lights on the concerns of the field by no longer taking for granted the givenness of time as a container for events or processes. The present argument has focused on how these critiques of temporality in IPE have advanced without addressing the problems of the denial of coevalness, without accounting for the co-creation of time by the subjects – including the subjects who produce research and theory. In these critiques, both time and subjectivity are rendered separately from the material bodies and the relations between them that are the conditions for the existence of these temporalities and these subjectivities.

For anthropology and ethnography, Fabian (2002) produced one of the most powerful arguments about the political consequences of this separation: while ethnographers must ‘share time’ with the people they study, the latter become objects, placed in the past and made subordinate in anthropology’s allochronic depictions of time. In IPE, the political consequences of this temporal rendering have been noted for discourses of development, for example in Hindess (2007) or in Blaney and Inayatullah (2010). However, to the extent that IPE fails to engage with the subjectivities that emerge from the social relations that define the field, it reproduces the denial of coevalness. Furthermore, Vij (2012) is correct to be wary of coevalness as an instituted alternative to monotemporal or allochronic conceptions. For a critical theory in political economy to confront the temporal forces that fragment bodies and sensibilities into relations of domination, sharing time with the other must also acknowledge the different temporalities mobilised by the other, the new complex temporalities that emerge in these encounters, and the forms of subjectification that shared temporalities produce.

Musicking shows how it is possible to produce coevalness while acknowledging heterotemporality. The capacity for musicking, as Tomlinson (2015) demonstrates, has formed and been formed in the prosaic and creative co-constitution of hominins and their environments through action sequences in social alliance. The mobilising of vulnerabilities in music through the co-presence of bodies in the doing of music points towards possibilities for subjectivity beyond the sovereign, autonomous individual subject that seeks to master its conditions and towards an intercorporeal and unenclosed subjectivity that emerges from intertwined material and social relations (Dean 2016).

To explore the analytical possibilities that music presents for understanding temporality in the context of IPE, this article has treated music neither as a special case for political economic analysis, nor as a metaphor for political or economic processes and relations. Musicking mobilises the affordances of the soundscapes in which artists and listeners encounter each other and develop sensibilities; the emergence of new properties when given sounds and materials are combined; the co-presence and entrainment of bodies sharing time and mobilising vulnerabilities; and thus, it mobilises subjectivity as an emerging condition of this intercorporeality, unmoored from fantasies of autonomy and mastery. The critiques of time and temporality in IPE can begin to produce coevalness and acknowledge heterotemporality by exploring IPE’s concerns rendered in the terms that musicking insists on, namely, the de-reification of the field’s objects through recognizing the co-presence in time of bodies mobilised by their openness and vulnerability. It can uncover political possibilities through re-partitioning the distribution of the sensible by making the equality of subjects a premise in the ways that the music in 4 Women No Cry mobilises the vulnerabilities of the artists and listeners as equals.

However, the concerns raised by Vij about coevalness remain: does the assertion of temporal co-presence through musicking necessarily mitigate the power relations articulated in the ‘Borromean rings’ of capital, nation, and state? The musicking in 4 Women No Cry and its subsequent project Monika Werkstatt depends on a co-creation of coevalness that addresses Vij’s challenge by disrupting the monumental time of capitalist markets in the times shared by musicians and listeners. It practices a time shared by artists and listeners as equally vulnerable and equally protagonists. In the production, distribution, and consumption of 4 Women No Cry and the following project Monika Werkstatt, the politics emerges from a refusal of the comfortable reproduction of existing social relations of musicking and indicate the possibilities for ‘noncapitalist alternative [economies] based upon reciprocal exchange at the level of transnational networks’ (Karatani, 2008, p. 591). The soundscapes of the tracks on the recordings are a chiasm intertwining embodied subjects – not only of the artists who produce the music but also of the artists and listeners. This intertwining happens through the mobilization of openness and vulnerabilities – again, not only of the listener but also, as is made clear in the evidence of the craft of the songs, of the vulnerabilities of the artists. This is mobilising vulnerability in Butler’s sense of the terms: the mobilising of receptiveness and responsiveness in relation to others we cannot master.

IPE is constituted in and through the affordances of the environments of the international political economy, the entrainment or coordination of the bodies in those environments, the emergent properties that come from combinations of material and social elements, and the vulnerabilities of bodies, including the bodies of scholars, theorists, researchers, and students. Just as musicking has begun to make important contributions to pedagogy in IPE (Bruff, 2021; 2022), it can also contribute to research and scholarship in the field. Explorations of temporalities in IPE have taken some important steps towards engaging these affordances, entrainments, emergences, and vulnerabilities. Musicking indicates the possibilities of producing coevalness and acknowledging heterotemporality in these explorations. To produce coevalness and acknowledge heterotemporality are further steps in understanding how equal subjects are rendered unequal under relations of domination, while musicking indicates ways in which inequality and domination do not need to be reproduced in the sharing and communicating of these understandings.

Acknowledgements

Many friends and colleagues commented patiently on earlier drafts of this article. I am especially grateful to Jimmy Casas Klausen for his invitation to present this at a ‘Brown Bag Seminar’ at PUC-Rio and to Anna Leander and Stefano Guzzini for their comments. Ritu Vij, Mike Shapiro, Naeem Inayatullah, Kyle Grayson, Jocelyn Mawdsley, and Simon Philpott gave much needed critiques and encouragement. Gudrun Gut generously gave time for an interview. All of RIPE’s anonymous reviewers and the editorial board provided sensitive, sharp, probing, and provocative readings of the submitted article and their critiques helped me improve it immeasurably.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Matt Davies

Matt Davies lectures in International Political Economy at Newcastle University (UK) and is a Visiting Professor (Professor Adjunto) at the International Relations Institute of the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro (Brazil). His research has focused on culture and everyday life in International Political Economy, with more recent work on aesthetics and cities in relation to production, broadly conceived.

Notes

1 Links to the songs on each album’s Bandcamp page are provided in the reference list. The full albums can be found on Bandcamp: 4 Women No Cry at https://monikalabel.bandcamp.com/album/4-women-no-cry; Vol. 2 at https://monikalabel.bandcamp.com/album/4-women-no-cry-vol-2; and Vol. 3 at https://monikalabel.bandcamp.com/album/4-women-no-cry-vol-3.

2 Sammam’s critique of the notion of temporality in the general equilibrium theory of neoclassical economics hints at a parallel with the monumental time of anarchic international relations as the ‘even larger entity’: ‘[with] the general equilibrium framework…questions of growth and change are formally excluded from theoretical models’ (Sammam, 2015, p. 971).

3 Borch examines the ways that the Flash Crash of 2010 was ‘eventalized’ in debates around high frequency trading and algorithmically controlled trades. Because the crash lasted around four and a half minutes (Borch, 2016, p. 351), defining the event engages time as a problem of duration. Similarly, though across a different kind of duration, Grabham (2016) examines the policy of setting a standard, though apparently arbitrary, twenty-six week qualifying periods for family-friendly employment rights as a matter of governance.

4 As David Scott (2004) argues, the appropriations of the past and constructions of the future depend on how the problems of the present manifest themselves to the writer.

5 Knight and Stewart (2016, p. 3) argue that the event of a crisis produces a ‘Husserlian phenomenology of time consciousness where the past, present, and future are all momentarily swimming together as the present undergoes successive re-evaluations’.

6 Fabian, for example, notes how the maintenance and renewal of imperial relations relied on the coeval recognition of the Other as an object (Fabian, 2002, p. 149) and Ho (2009) explores how workers in financial services deny of coevalness with other precarious workers by asserting instead their coevalness with the market.

7 However, as Born (2011, p. 378) notes, DeNora’s microsociological approach to musicking is not sufficient to account for complex social mediations; rather than seeing consumer behavior as being shaped by the soundscape, the point would be to understand subjectivity as emergent in the intertwining of complex social relations and the distributed materiality of the musical environment of a retail space.

8 (Gudrun Gut, personal communication, 10 November 2016); the illustrations in the insert booklet in volume 2 also suggest this.