A couple of mistakes snowballed on my end in this first round of reading/discussing/writing: wanting to be more familiar with the topic, I read every paper on the list Eamonn put together. I think it was worth it, but that took extra time and I didn’t have the courage to attempt to boil it all back down into an even succinct reply before our online meeting. Then, right after the quite productive chat (thank you all for making it) I got really sick and have been wobbling my way back into this material. Apologies for the delay.
When Eamonn put together this list he prefaced it with writing that these readings did “not address sound or music head-on.” That framed my attention for working through them, trying to pick out elements which did in fact seem to apply to music studies. I’ll review my main finds in this regard and try to sketch something out of them.
Benjamin, in her introduction, writes “The animating force of the New Jim Code is that tech designers encode judgments into technical systems but claim that the racist results of their designs are entirely exterior to the encoding process.” (pdf 18). I want to take this as the basis of a potentially radical synthesizer or sound system. If we can encode judgments into technical systems, maybe we can encode – partially, weakly, hackably – but still, intentionally and explicitly anti-racist judgements into musical systems. Operating in hindsight, some might consider making the argument that in many ways, black musicians’ re-scripting (to borrow Madeleine Akrich’s term) of the turntable as not just an instrument, but a popular one too, did exactly that.
I also think that Benjamin’s conception of the New Jim Code highlights another friction in some of long-term points of contention with science and technology studies: its focus, as a discipline, on what I’d call “critical” systems, or, in Charles Perrow’s terminology, “high-risk” systems. Perrow’s terminology is developed in the context of a study of nuclear reactors. I’m certainly not suggesting that STS should stop studying nuclear reactors, or even that it’s surprising that STS focuses on AI, nuclear energy, facebook, stuxnet, etc. But what I am suggesting is that, as Benjamin notes, the New Jim Code affects things as low-risk as handsoap dispensers: in fact, it is especially in these mundane situations that we notice the extent to which Jim Crow laws have carried over so extensively in our techno-absurdist everyday. A device which should make handsoap more accessible just embodies the biases of the hegemonic position.
So what if rather than hacking uranium enrichment centrifuges to prevent Iran from building a nuclear arsenal (https://www.wired.com/2011/07/how-digital-detectives-deciphered-stuxnet/), we reflected on how even the design of “low-risk” devices like synthesizers reflected the biases, not just of the New Jim Code, but of colonialism global legacy, of classism across borders? All of these affect what synths you can find, find time to use, and ultimately, the music you make with them. Of course the mechanics of how these supra-user conditions shape a compromise with the user’s ideas and ideals is variable and tricky to assess, but perhaps there are useful concepts to reflect on the mechanics of how non-critical systems interact with their users to produce actually existing technologically-defined musical cultures, and how we can re-investigate and re-invest in these cultures to understand these mechanics and change them for good in future iterations. If we can’t identify the New Jim Code in our everyday how are we going to address the Next Jim Code in the large technological systems that largely define that everyday?
This is where the other articles offered such productive concepts. I was particularly drawn to Philip, Irany and Dourish’s proposal for a postcolonial computing. Quoting p.5:
That is, we see critique and rewriting as part of the same tactical process. We offer no absolute escape from ideology, no newly “appropriate” technologies or quick cultural fixes. Postcolonial Computing is a bag of tools that affords us contingent tactics for continual, careful, collective, and always partial reinscriptions of a cultural-technical situation in which we all find ourselves.
A reflexive tactic is the first green flag for me. I’ve been entirely convinced by Burawoy’s argument that (I’m paraphrasing) there’s only participant observation. There is no appropriate synth, no “quick” design. We need a bag of tools for relating consumer commodities, even the ones that produce the least value, to the large technocultural systems of production and consumption that enable their existence – that’s true of musical instruments generally and electronic music instruments specifically. Conveniently, they outline their tactics – I’ve commented on each of them with how they might help to think about electronic music objects:
Tactic 1: When we see a technoscientific object, we investigate its contingency not only locally but in the infrastructures, assemblages, and political economies that are the conditions of its possibilities.
When we see electronic music instruments and recordings, we need methods to apprehend its contingency locally and globally. This hints at the incomplete documentation of electronics and their supply chain. I still need to read Kyle Devine’s “Decomposed” – some of the youtube cartoon interview that came out prior to the book hints at some of the answers. So does Alejandra Bronfman’s forthcoming book chapter on mica (“glittering.”)
Tactic 2: When we see a technoscientific regime coalescing, we look for work that is out of bounds of this regime.
Tactic 4: When technoscientific knowledge appears to diffuse from higher to lower concentrations, we look for signs of the opposite. What forms of technical practice seem to move against the flow, to develop unexpectedly, to pool in alternative spaces? What else (peo- ple, technological objects, laws, and capital?) moves with, or against, these knowledge practices?
When we modes of electronic sound consumption and production solidifying their position in our material everyday, we should be looking for those and that which escape. Without idealizing them, music cultures, with their folk, diy, local and contrarian traditions, are a privileged locus of investigation to examine the rest of popular and underground culture in technological contexts.
Tactic 3: When we see claims of inherent technological and cultural dif- ference, we apply STS methods symmetrically to both the technology and the culture at hand. But we do not stop there; we proceed to deconstruct the binary between technology and culture and study the impure crossings between them.
Nature/Culture, Culture/Techniques are both strong narratives in the history of music studies. Furthermore, STS has a strong sound studies / organological connection, see Emily Dolan or Thor Magnusson in addition to Pinch, Oudshoorn et al. mentioned earlier. Once again stories of electronic music seem like they could be fitting case-studies for this postcolonial computing approach.
Tactic 3, Corollary : When we see an instance of indigenous science or “native” technology, we investigate it not as an instance of inherent difference or autochthonous authenticity but as a practice with the same epistemological status as putatively Western sciences. In other words, our categories, while always subject to grounded interrogation and theoretical critique, emerge from assumptions of diachronic imbrication rather than synchronic incommensurability.
Organology (see the edited “issues in ethnomusicology” volume and Kartomi’s monograph) is a discipline in which this attitude is arguably prefigured outside of the digital. Those investigations are still rife with airs of colonialism and post-colonialism, but they – on their surfaces – did regularly present indigineous technology (including organological classification systems, not just instruments themselves) with the same epistemological status as western ones. Of course ethnomusicology has been reckoning with its own admission of biases (see the latest journal of musicology issue) – so this isn’t a model for future work as much as a starting point, one that in some cases did manage to begin with context and particulars:
Tactic 5: The universal model, the view from everywhere, and the voice of the center remain radically incomplete. But they cannot be completed by addition. Context and particulars are always already constitutive of a sociotechnical model, and therefore we begin with them, rather than adding them as “complex” supplements to a “simple” initial model.
If contemporary music occasionally sees close correlation between individual pieces and individual technologies, then organology’s potential as a generative scholarship (understand how past instruments worked and were used to develop new instruments and uses) might be infused with a new-found relevance, once that must be considered in the context of contemporary computing’s heavy biases, some forms of which are identified by Benjamin as the New Jim Code. But the theoretical and tactical vocabulary of the other articles (Ron Eglash’s generative conception of some technologies, Coleman’s and Chun’s different but complementary leveragings of race as technology, amongst many more) highlight other important perspectives and alleys of investigation.
Electronic music is interesting to me in the sense that it is a genre named after the technical medium that makes it possible. Consumed as mp3s, streams, and CDs, it very much is a technoscientific object that is also cultural. For the type of electronic music I am studying in my dissertation, this goes further in the sense that there is a whole subset of this practice that design instruments for each work of electronic music. In other words, the electronic instruments, the electronic music and the user(s) are all co-constructed in a messy process of iteration, half-drafts, undocumented attempts, fleeting thoughts and other ephemera that culminate in the sometimes-artificially repeatable experience of the “artwork.”
Paraphrasing these tactics: How do we begin to address its local and extralocal contingencies of electronic music? how do deconstruct the mechanisms that link them? how do we assess these mechanisms over time to understand how these musics and instruments and users coalesce and perform boundary work to keep track of what it out of bounds? Does it make sense to call it an “impure crossing”? What are the hierarchies of musical practices and what mechanisms keep those things fluid? Electronic music and its instruments are rife with alternative spaces, and we know too well the mechanisms of appropriation which move them from the local to the globally commodified. At the same time, I don’t think I need to outline exactly how the these global trading routes feed back materially and culturally into its own variation. What is more interesting, and what I think these papers valuably outline, is am attitude and a set of values with which to identify the material and ideological resources at hand, who performs the labor, who benefits from it, and how we can make electronic music – which was always part of most techno-cultural imaginaries – have a more explicitly understood place in the STS study of “everything else.” In doing so, I think we can address a significant peculiarity in the field of STS: how, when people like Trevor Pinch and Nelly Oudshoorn, Antoine Hennion, and Georgina Born to an extent, study effectively produce sociologies of musical instruments and musical instrument practices as interesting to STS, they offer only oblique perspectives on how or where these instruments and there product fit within the wider context of our global technocultural imaginary. Surely we can update Jacques Attali’s “Noise” book.
references:
Akrich, Madeleine. “The De-Scription of Technical Objects.” In In Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change, edited by Wiebe Bijker and John Law, 205–24. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992.
Attali, Jacques. Noise: The Political Economy of Music. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014.
Benjamin, Ruha. Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Medford, MA: Polity, 2019.
Bronfman, Alejandra. “Glittery: Unearthed Histories of Music, Mica and Work,” 2018.
Burawoy, Michael. “The Extended Case Method.” Sociological Theory 16, no. 1 (1998): 4–33.
Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. “Introduction: Race and/as Technology; or, How to Do Things to Race.” Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 24, no. 1 (2009): 7–35. https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-2008-013.
Coleman, Beth. “Race as Technology.” Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 24, no. 1 (2009): 177–207. https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-2008-018.
Devine, Kyle. “Decomposed: A Political Ecology of Music.” Popular Music 34, no. 3 (2015): 367–389.
———. Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2019.
Dolan, Emily. “Toward a Musicology of Interfaces.” Keyboard Perspectives 5 (2012): 1–12.
Eglash, Ronald Bruce. “Anti-Racist Technoscience: A Generative Tradition.” In Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life, edited by Ruha Benjamin, 227–51, 2019.
Kartomi, Margaret J. On Concepts and Classifications of Musical Instruments. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.
Magnusson, Thor. “Epistemic Tools: The Phenomenology of Digital Musical Instruments.” University of Sussex, 2009.
Oudshoorn, Nelly E.J., and Trevor J Pinch. How Users Matter: The Co-Construction of Users and Technologies. MIT press, 2003.
Perrow, Charles. “Fukushima and the Inevitability of Accidents.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 67, no. 6 (2011): 44–52.
Philip, Kavita, Lilly Irani, and Paul Dourish. “Postcolonial Computing: A Tactical Survey.” Science, Technology, & Human Values 37, no. 1 (January 2012): 3–29. https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243910389594.
Zetter, Kim. “How Digital Detectives Deciphered Stuxnet, the Most Menacing Malware in History.” Wired, July 11, 2011. https://www.wired.com/2011/07/how-digital-detectives-deciphered-stuxnet/.