“certain that i can own this music and not be…”

constellation for title, score, speaker, and program note at a concert hall (2022-23)

presented under the pseudonym [author present as printed words]

Statement:

content description: verbal descriptions of relations of chattel slavery and anti-Blackness.

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This work’s full title (not displayed in full in more public settings) is “certain that i can own this music and not be owned myself.” In this work, I investigate property relations embedded in infrastructures of concert music. Specifically, I approach concert music’s central Work-concept, which packages musical practice in units understood as “complete and discrete, original and fixed, personally-owned” (Lydia Goehr), as a property relation, and read that relation through analytics of black study. The piece’s title asks how is it possible for the sovereign composing and intellectual property-owning Subject to, on one hand, own music as an unsovereign Object, and yet, on the other hand, be exempt from the possibility of Objecthood? Drawing on earlier work by Hortense Spillers and Denise Ferreira da Silva, black study scholar Calvin Warren argues that the possibility of a tidy categorical distinction between Subject and Object is constitutively underwritten by anti-Blackness: 

“[Patricia] Tuitt’s … claim that the presence of the slave engenders law provides insight into the relation between law and ontology. Contract law (law of chattel) is perhaps the hallmark of modern legal development, given the need to regulate commerce and specify the rights and entitlement of property holders. But this corpus of law emerges because one needs to integrate the slave into the world. In other words, contract law conceals an ontological project: it uses the discourse of property, chattel, rights, and trade to divide the world into human subjects [Dasein], those who are entitled to the protection and enforcement of their ontological (non)relation, and the world of things, those entities lacking such protection of any relation, but whose existence is necessary for the human to operate within the world. The law of chattel performs the work of dividing legal seeing from not seeing. Thus, the law of chattel, through the contract form, is predicated upon an ontological difference that it disavows (or more precisely forgets): the difference between Being (the self that is the locus of rights and entitlement, as a stand-in for the ontological [non]relation) and being (the world of objects that support this self).”

From this standpoint, all private property relations, even those of supposedly rarefied realms like the musical, are haunted by the inherent difficulty of separating positions of Subject and Object. The appearance, then, of a clean ontological cut between Subject and Object is subtended by the positioning of bodies read as black as “pure function,” that is, as buffers between these two realms.

In the present piece, I trace Warren’s analytics through specific attributes of concert halls, with the piece being newly made based on the particulars of each location in which it is realized. A speaker plays audio traces of the wrapping of metal chains, while a page of printed notations marks features implicated in inscribing certain bodies as owned, and features implicated in producing certain bodies as outside of the possibility of being owned. As a person who is read as white, I deliberately limit the scope of the piece to the position and methods of whiteness; as such this avoids the pornotropic display of wounded bodies cautioned against by Hortense Spillers, as well as what Eve Tuck (Unangax̂) calls damage-centered narratives.