Abstract

Experimental music practices have frequently explored the potentials of different sound-making devices – be they ‘conventional’ instruments, everyday objects, recording media or human bodies. In this chapter, I suggest that experimental musicians can be understood to interrogate the ‘not yet knowing’ of Baruch Spinoza’s famous axiom: ‘no-one has yet determined what a body can do’. As Deleuze makes clear, the Spinozist body, constituted by its relations of motions and rest; and by its power to affect and be affected, might be a human body, but it might also be an electronic circuit, a performer with an instrument, or an improvising collective. I explore Spinoza’s question of ‘what can a body do?’ in relation to two artists: the improvising cellist Okkyung Lee and media artist Yasunao Tone – both of whom can be understood to explore the audio-affective capacities of sound-making bodies. Using these examples, I argue Deleuze’s Spinoza provides a fruitful basis for a materialist account of musical praxis. It can be used to capture something of the complex, affective relations that occur between performing bodies, instruments, electronics and media technologies; helping us to move beyond the insufficient binary between active ‘musicking’ subjects and passive musical objects that has often dominated musicological thought.