On Music as Material Practice of Vibration.
Works Reviewed. Marcus Boon The Politics of Vibration: Music as a Cosmopolitical Practice. Durham, Duke University Press, 2022. 279 pages.
In the song “Johnny Was,” the great Bob Marley paints us a picture, in sound, of a grieving mother whose son has been caught in the crossfire of a battle that was not his own. The mother then becomes, out of necessity, a philosopher, because the work of grief is analytical work. “How can she work it out? She knows that the wages of sin is death, but the gift of Jah is life?” But the philosophical process is not that of the thinker alone; it is instead a dialogue with a passerby. “Explaining to her, was a passerby,” who is revealed to be none other than the singer himself.
The explanation does not really consist of an analysis of causal events leading to Johnny’s death, although these are briefly alluded to – Johnny is dead because of the system. The real explanation, however, is the song itself, offering a kind of sonic rebirth. Marcus Boon, in The Politics of Vibration draws on the lyrics of a song sung by the Hindustani vocalist Prandit Pram Nath: “God is sound. Explain by singing.”1 How else to understand Marley in a song whose proffered explanation is just the reiteration that Johnny was a good man? The very last line is a question… “Can a woman’s tender care, cease toward the child she bear?”
The implicit answer is no, but that “no” – that cry – has to born sonically, or to put it differently, the singer bears witness to the woman’s grief, and at the conjuncture of sorrow and sound something new is brought into being. Natal expression is preserved and extended in that space of death. Space of life, space of death. Which gives to the overall tone of Marley’s Rastaman Vibration album a resonance of surprising maturity. This ain’t just “good vibes.” These are powerful, god-level vibrations – capable even, maybe, of resurrecting the dead.
If Marcus Boon allows me, I will quote the last sentence of his book, which i think wonderfully expresses the scope and ambition of the work:
“The politics of vibration, then, is this challenge of the conjunction of inner and outer in constellating the field – the bodies on the street, the bodies on the dance floor, quiet attendance to the most ordinary or fundamental of mysteries, the rising up of a wave, its transmission, diffusion, diffraction, fall, and rise again, the repetition of that and how periodicity’s patterns condense and dissolve, how we and the world are the product of that, how me might immerse ourselves more deeply in the truth of that, why it is so difficult to do that, and yet the fact of our persistence, in love, in the propagation of it, which is itself an aspect of the whole, the whole thing, in its wholeliness.”2
The Politics of Vibration, like Johnny Was, begins in a scene of liveliness that is at the same time a scene of sorrow. It’s a free show in Scarborough in the park, with kids laughing and playing. It rains, and the song playing is a song called Double Suicide, and the author thinks of rainy season ragas and the suicide of his own two friends. As I read, I think of Alejandro, a man who was like an older brother to me. It’s been 27 years, but I don’t forget. I’ll never forget that. He was 18 years old.
How can I work it out?
There are some additional difficulties here, for us in this time of accelerated soundscapes, and fairly radical emotional disjointedness. Boon analogues the Double Suicide song with a rainy season raga, but points out that no one was really asking for it to rain, and there was nothing to do but accept the incredible sadness of those deaths… and everything would carry on anyways. “None of us knew how to make that connection anymore, but it was almost better when it happened by accident… with no causality greater than the fact of its happening.”3
Music, for Boon, emerges out of a ‘politics of vibration.” The particular vision of politics that he holds owes a lot to Isabelle Stengers, and her work on cosmopolitics. There is an element of transhumanism in Stengers particular defining of the term, asking how non-human actors might be rendered visible in a space where “politics, defined according to a horizon of human dissensus, denies them such visibility.”4
Boon wants to take this insight into the field of music, through his exploration of vibrational ontology. We end up, in what feels like a natural progression with the Indigenous hip-hop crew Halluci Nation (formerly A Tribe Called Red) with a vibrational decolonization of time ” as a hopeful direction in the complex politics of vibration. Not without a long march through the sounds of Prandit Pran Nath, Catherine Christer Hennix, and DJ Screw. Classical Hindustani vocalization, Swedish drone composition, and Houston hip-hop. Cosmopolitical in a classically Kantian sense too.
What kind of access to vibration is permitted? What is music, what is noise? Mathematically and physically, religiously and ontologically, psychologically and psychoanalytically as a determinant of subjectivity.5 Boon’s reflections span across several registers not often brought together; an interdisciplinary project.
I found, reading this book, that my mind would often take flight, tracking its insights in my own fashion, to see where they could go – where I could go with them, or where they took me – rather than trying to painstakingly draw out the origins of the particular concept. If Boon is right, in aligning his work with Alain Badiou’s notion of the philosophical task as clarifying a truth procedure, then is this a sign of the book’s success?
Maybe, and maybe not. I found it curious that Boon added religion or spirituality to Badiou’s set of truth procedures “without apology.” Given the very real antagonism towards religion displayed by the French thinker is such an addition really possible absent a considerable amount of philosophical groundwork being laid? As for music itself being a kind of truth procedure, as Boon suggests it might be, my sense is that in Badiou’s systematization he would treat it instead at the intersection of art and love, or perhaps art and science.
However, the point Boon makes with respect to Badiou’s truth procedures is simply to highlight that he, like Alain Badiou, is using a philosophical language to clarify concepts that are developed elsewhere, and not that he is rigorously adhering to Badiou’s idea. In fact, Boon is clarifying musical concepts that are drawn from domains which might at times fit into Badiou’s conceptualization, as when he draws on the scientific or artistic registers. “Art and science, then are particular modes of ordering the primordial force of vibration.”6
The Politics of Vibration is a beautiful meditation on sound and politics. A gesture towards a revolutionary politics of emancipation whose religious sensibility is, in a sense, oriented towards music itself as the clearest expression freedom.
The array of interlocutors, both musical and philosophical, is dazzling, spanning from the classical music of Pran Nath at the moment of decolonization, to the psychoanalytic infused approach of Hennix, the slowed down sounds of DJ Screw, and finally to decolonizing sounds of Halluci Nation and their efforts to connect with the earth and to renew and expand the political horizon through that effort and through the emerging soundscape.
Music, for Boon, really does seem to be the expression of the divine within our temporality. “Only music remains in this time span,” says Boon.7 And he wonders if we can imagine a revolution in the political economy one of whose goals is to reconfigure the place of music in the world and to finally make possible a life playing, talking, and thinking about music.
He ends with Bob Marley’s advice to “lively up yourself.” From the 1974 album Natty Dread. It may be a bit of a self directed pep talk, there is a note of resignation in the end of the book, but also a resilience and a determination to remain within the song, within the practice of a vibration of sound that is communicative and common. So, perhaps to bring in one more lyric, we end with Leonard Cohen’s “even though it all went wrong, I’ll stand before the Lord of Song, with nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah.”
The Mourning Cloak 
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