The Politics of Vibration: Music as a Cosmopolitical Practice

by Marcus Boon

In The Politics of Vibration Marcus Boon explores music as a material practice of vibration. Focusing on the work of three contemporary musicians—Hindustani classical vocalist Pandit Pran Nath, Swedish drone composer and philosopher Catherine Christer Hennix, and Houston-based hip-hop musician DJ Screw—Boon outlines how music constructs a vibrational space of individual and collective transformation. Contributing to a new interdisciplinary field of vibration studies, he understands vibration as a mathematical and a physical concept, as a religious or ontological force, and as a psychological determinant of subjectivity. Boon contends that music, as a shaping of vibration, needs to be recognized as a cosmopolitical practice—in the sense introduced by Isabelle Stengers—in which what music is within a society depends on what kinds of access to vibration are permitted, and to whom. This politics of vibration constitutes the hidden ontology of contemporary music because the organization of vibration shapes individual music scenes as well as the ethical choices that participants in these scenes make about how they want to live in the world.

Genres: Music

288 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2022

About the author

Marcus B. Boon is a Professor of English teaching contemporary literature and cultural theory at the University of York, Toronto, Canada. His interests include literature in the digital age, critical theory, the Beats and other alternative and countercultures, popular music, and the cultural study of spirituality and religion.

Reviews

[Kacper Zaduszny · Rating 5 out of 5]

Neatly ties together multiple rare and interesting sources without much repetition and an honest attempt at gaining personal (local) insight from these. Reads well.

[Vincent Pollard · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found this book by chance, I thought the concept sounded interesting and was really looking forward to reading it, but I found it to be impenetrable in parts, structurally muddled in others and pretentiously worded throughout.

Although I only know the three main artists discussed here by name and reputation, and not really by their work, the concept appealed to me and given how there is a lot of overlap in our political views, musical tastes (e.g. The Fall, Shabazz Palaces, Prince, Kendrick Lamar, Sandro Perri, A Tribe Called Red, Miles Davis, DJ Sprinkles) and experiences (British music obsessives living in Toronto) I thought I might relate a lot to the book and maybe learn something but my experience was more a sense of alienation peppered with fits of rage, specifically triggered by passages like the following:

“If the twoity thus born is divested of all quality, it passes into the empty form of the common substratum of all twoites.”

“In this dense but powerfully clear statement, Hennix superimposes a psychoanalytic reading of the topology of the subject onto an intuitionistic mathematical idea of choice sequences as constructions of the Creative Sub-ject, onto a topos theoretical idea of a site between ontologies in which the intuitionistic apparatus of construction might come into play, onto an idea of musical improvisation to be found in Indian classical music, post-Cagean ex-perimentalism, and the Black radical tradition.”

Now, maybe this book just isn’t for me, and probably I lack the academic foundation to really appreciate it - a lot of it went over my head, especially in Parts 2 & 3 - but I found it to be on the whole a waste of my time. A few interesting ideas but the author gets so lost in himself that he (or the reader) loses the thread completely in parts. Parts 1 & 4 were somewhat accessible but Parts 2 & 3 almost completely impenetrable. Part 3 also seemed like a bunch of ideas and anecdotes crow-barred into the text that would have been better explained in the 3 main sections or just left out.

The pretentiousness and over-analysis is illustrated in examples like the following. The first quote is the author and the second quote is the artist (DJ Screw) himself.

“Echoing some of Alexander Wchliye's comments, Screw's music could be understood as a refusal of accelerationist narratives of futurity and the posthumanism that often accompanies them, one that opens up a different kind of futurity, predicated on the ahuman and the amodern, understood as undervalued potential-ities.“

“I started messing with the pitch adjusters on the turntables and slowed it all the way down. I thought the music sounded better like that."

A potentially interesting topic and presentation that is marred by being solipsistic and inaccessible. In short, it’s in need of a brutal editor to make it work for the layperson. Also I never want to see the word ‘topos’ ever again in my lifetime.