At Lars’s prompting I’m posting an unedited version of the Newcastle Keynote paper for any who might be interested. A teaser:
It is easy to think of society as a thing, substance, or entity. We often talk of what “society does”, what it thinks, and how it behaves. We talk about the properties or qualities of the social as if it were a substance possessing attributes. We treat the social as a substantial being, like the identity underlying all the qualitative transformations of Descartes’ famous wax in the Second Meditation. We might, after the fashion of some tendencies in Levi-Strauss, for instance, speak of self-identical structures of mind persisting throughout time. However, if we consider the newborn infant or the feral child, and if we consider the disappearance of societies, their dissolution in history, we see that the social is not something that can be thought as a substance, but is rather something that must be constituted, produced, engendered. And not only must the social be produced or engendered, it must be produced or engendered again and again in the order of time as a series of ongoing actions, operations, or events. The social, in short, is a process.
You can find the rest of it here: territories_of_music1.pdf . The key concept in everything I’m working on is that of individuation and how individuation requires us to recast a number of philosophical questions. As such, this paper might productively be read in relation to this old blog post.
Larval Subjects . 
December 16, 2007 at 10:23 pm
You might want to take a look at my review of Steven Mithen’s The Singing Neanderthals:
http://www.human-nature.com/nibbs/05/wlbenzon.html
There’s been a bit of recent research on how people actually use music to regulate their moods. See Tia DeNora, Music in Everyday Life, Cambridge UP 2000.
December 18, 2007 at 12:43 am
In Philip K. Dick’s book DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP, upon which the movie BLADE RUNNER is based, there is an instrument called ”mood organ” which alters your mood on the press of a button.
December 18, 2007 at 12:24 pm
Thanks for sharing the essay. For what it’s worth, I think Luhmann, in ‘The Individuality of the Individual’ (1986) provides a kind of historical narrative that touches upon some of the issues you raise, although still too briefly and in sideways fashion via his particular version of autopoetic theory. It might be reasonable to argue that for him, any system – living/organic, conscious, or social – that manages to achieve autopoiesis is an ‘individual,’ with the individual human subject, a concept which he evidently regards as passe, being only a specific case. However, what distinguishes the conscious and the social are their dependence on semantic distinctions that allow for the individual to guide its operations through self-reference, which allows it to mark itself off from an external and hypercomplex environment at the same time. I’d agree then that for Luhmann the question of change is rather pessimistically cast – not because it doesn’t happen, but rather because our semantics are always struggling (and I think for him, failing) to keep up with the plenitude of risks and possibilities generated by an increasingly structurally complex environment. Sorry, that’s garbled.
December 18, 2007 at 5:04 pm
Andrew, thanks for reminding me of this essay. I do think there are profound points of resonance between Luhmann and Deleuze, which I why I sometimes obsessively return to the two of them. For Deleuze, of course, individuation is not the individual, but the process by which any sort of entity comes to be. Individuation would thus refer to the process by which specific rock formations take on their characteristics, planets, trees, organisms, social systems, human individuals, etc. I am probably being unfair to Luhmann on certain points here. For instance, Art as a Social System and Love as Passion: The Codification of Intimacy are both deeply attentive to questions of individuation in their attentiveness to how certain forms of affect, practices, and discourses came to be in history. My reservations about Luhmann revolve around just how strong his notion of social systems is, leaving little room for the formation of alliances and shifting relations among elements that then rebound on larger, more established social networks and patterns. It seems to me that Luhmann started to move in a different direction in his very late work when he began looking at masses and protest movements, all of which have very different forms of organization than those found in his prior, more institutional focus.
December 19, 2007 at 9:58 am
dr Sinthome it was magnificent. I almost fell asleep during the introduction, but the payoff woke me up totally! The delivery was self-assured yet suave.
December 20, 2007 at 9:01 pm
Here’s a post that might interest you:
http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/article/conversations_known_and_unknown_tales_on_a/
It’s not about music; it’s about graffiti. But it speaks to the issues of agency, bottom up social formation, and ubiquity.
December 21, 2007 at 1:45 am
[…] new post on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, and one of Sinthome’s papers papers, available at Larval […]
December 22, 2007 at 5:37 pm
I’ve been thinking about your paper and the Kassabian paper you reference.
For reasons I’ll get to, I’m sympathetic to your argument. The problem is that you present the formulations to which I’m sympathetic in the context of discussion a certain kind of musical praxis in a specific socio-cultural moment (late capitalism). Yet it seems to me that you have, in fact, wandered into formulations that in some measure apply to the most basic forms of musical practice in the simplest of human societies. It’s as though your specificity is incidental to your formulation rather than central to it.
What’s valid, it seems to me, is bottom-up, collective agency & subjectivity, and ubiquity in the sense that everyone is involved. We’ve got the individual as but a node in a non-coercive, non-Borg, web of social relations.
Qualifications: Music is not available 24/7 in hunter gatherer societies. So it is not temporally ubiquitous. But there is a lot of it and it can be all-encompassing when it happens, with everyone actively singing and dancing. What you don’t find is something like a formal concert, with performers in one place presenting to an audience in another (very close) place. That is, the situation that is, to us, the paradigmatic one of musical performance, the one we’re most familiar with, that situation does not appear to be the most basic, the most fundamental, form of music. Rather, it is derivative.
I argue, in Beethoven’s Anvil, that music-and-dance is the means through which a bunch of clever apes transformed themselves into human beings. I’m certainly not the first to make that argument; Darwin made it and, I believe, so did Rousseau. Lots of folks are making that argument these days, most prominently Steven Mithen (I’ve already linked to my review of his book, The Singing Neanderthals). I then explicitly argue that music is thus at the origins of specifically human sociality.
So, the non-Borg web is what made us. Once that was in place, then language could differentiate out.
In the course of writing that book on music I became convinced that all our intuitions about psychology and social relations are deeply and all but ineradicably Cartesian — hardly a novel idea. By which I mean that we take as our starting point, the lone individual trying to make sense of the world. Is there a world out there or am I being fooled? Are there other minds? We know there are, but that fact is a philosophical puzzle. When we think of music, we think of the individual listener or the individual performer; when we think of the performing group, it’s a group of individuals who somehow have to perform together. We have real problems thinking about group behavior as fundamental and basic, rather than as being derived from individual behavior.
But I don’t think we can deeply understand music any other way. When people make music and dance together, their nervous systems become coupled together into a single physical system. That’s the fundamental phenomenon, that’s what allowed apes to become human.
We’ve been critiquing the Cartesian subject for half a century now, but Cartesian intuitions keeping seeping in around the edges of the critique. It seems to me that it’s because our intuitions are Cartesian that this notion of ubiquitous music raises the spectre of the Borg. To the Cartesian subject, collectivity inevitably tends toward the Borg. Hence, to consider music as a some kind of collective phenomenon we’ve got to assure ourselves that it’s not the Borg.
How do we advance so deeply into the 21st century that we no longer need to protect ourselves from the 19th through continuous critique?