Can you love your neighbor’s music like your own? Some notes on material ethics

Who is playing this music? If the answer to the question is ‘an orchestra’ or ‘a band,’ then I have decided to visit a concert venue or turned on an audio device. Ethical questions in respect to the music are thus absorbed by an aesthetic setting: As far as listening is grounded in my personal freedom, which the cultural institution objectively respects, the music that I listen to has been cleansed of interpersonal affects. A wealth of genuinely aesthetic emotions replaces social emotions. I may feel the romantic longing in the excessively stretched-out cadences of a symphony, or the sweet bitterness of a pop song about betrayal, or the uplifting ‘fuck you, world!’ aggression in punk. But I feel all this in relation to the music and its imaginary ‘I,’ not in a personal relation to the musicians. Even when I choose to fall in love with the singer, I do so knowing full well that they are but what my imagination creates and that my feelings will not lead to a relationship. In this lecture, I will consider exceptions to this normalcy of aesthetic emotions replacing social emotions: music that I get to listen to because my neighbor is playing it; music that retains its social, economic, and political affectivity because it is being played in a manner that makes the performers’ decisions to play it this way more important than my decision to listen to them; and the groupie who sees to it that their desire for the imaginary ‘I’ in songs is physically fulfilled. These examples will, hopefully, allow for some remarks on an ethical dimension of music that has less to do with expression, message, or questions of form-and-content, and more with the value attached to the material conditions of playing and listening.

 

Kai van Eikels combines philosophy, theater and performance studies in his work. He is currently teaching at Ruhr-Universität Bochum. His research topics include: collectivity and politics of participation; art and labor; synchronization, time and matter; queer cuteness. Publications include: Performance Research 16:3 “On Participation and Synchronization” (ed., with Bettina Brandl-Risi), 2011; Die Kunst des Kollektiven. Performance zwischen Theater, Politik und Sozio-Ökonomie, 2013; Art works. Ästhetik des Postfordismus (with Netzwerk Kunst + Arbeit), 2015; Synchronisieren. Ein Essay zur Materialität des Kollektiven, 2020. Articles, in German and English, can be found on his Academia page, https://rub.academia.edu/KaivanEikels and on his theory blog, https://kunstdeskollektiven.wordpress.com