Marcus Boon explores music as a material practice of vibration that emerges from a politics of vibration and which constructs a vibrational space of individual and collective transformation.
In The Politics of Vibration Marcus Boon explores music as a material practice of vibration. Focusing on the work of three contemporary musicians-Hindustani classical vocalist Pandit Pran Nath, Swedish drone composer and philosopher Catherine Christer Hennix, and Houston-based hip-hop musician DJ Screw-Boon outlines how music constructs a vibrational space of individual and collective transformation. Contributing to a new interdisciplinary field of vibration studies, he understands vibration as a mathematical and a physical concept, as a religious or ontological force, and as a psychological determinant of subjectivity. Boon contends that music, as a shaping of vibration, needs to be recognized as a cosmopolitical practice-in the sense introduced by Isabelle Stengers-in which what music is within a society depends on what kinds of access to vibration are permitted, and to whom. This politics of vibration constitutes the hidden ontology of contemporary music because the organization of vibration shapes individual music scenes as well as the ethical choices that participants in these scenes make about how they want to live in the world.
“"The boldest aspect of Boon's argument . . . is his move to the level of ontology--to the nature of being or reality itself. For him music's social and racial significance operates not at the level of social codes or experience, but as an intervention in how reality itself is organised: 'music does tell us something about being.' His framework certainly allows a place for aspects of music-making that usually get screened out of modern criticism: its religious power, its role in many cultures' sense of the world's structure. . . ."”
"The boldest aspect of Boon's argument . . . is his move to the level of ontology-to the nature of being or reality itself. For him music's social and racial significance operates not at the level of social codes or experience, but as an intervention in how reality itself is organised: 'music does tell us something about being.' His framework certainly allows a place for aspects of music-making that usually get screened out of modern criticism: its religious power, its role in many cultures' sense of the world's structure. . . ." - Dan Barrow (The Wire)
"This book is a wonderful contribution to the burgeoning field of vibrational studies and so-called 'esoteric' music. ... It prompts new insights into the relationship of music to time, community, politics, and philosophy, offering new perspectives for those interested in how music can be looped into new knowledges being generated within the field of sound studies."
- Cat Hope (Journal of Sonic Studies) "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." - Joshua Gerhard Paetkau (Antiopia) "For those of us writing about vibration within sound studies, The Politics of Vibration offers exciting new entry points for considering sound’s materiality. In the wave of books addressing vibration in the past decade, it is the most thorough and meticulous. . . . The Politics of Vibration offers us a portal into future configurations in the field." - Christine Capetola (Journal of Popular Music Studies)Marcus Boon is Professor of English at York University, author of In Praise of Copying and The Road of Excess: A History of Writers on Drugs, and coauthor of Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism.
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