* * *

ANT posits a particular understanding of agency. In music studies, a proprietorial model – one ‘has’ agency or one does not – has stubbornly persisted, despite much productive work in philosophy, the social sciences, and gender studies that understands agency as the result of events that produce subjects that act and objects that are acted upon. Moreover, the very fluidity of these arrangements – or the manner in which relationships in the real world multiply, overlap, and change – calls attention to the motile web of relations that define and enable any actor's role. The network affords an actor certain ways to work; change the network, and you change the actor. ANT authors are generally more interested in the effects of actions than in their causes. What does an action produce? Some effects, of course, but also an actor. In this sense, ANT's grammar of agency constantly shifts from active to passive and back again: an actor acts, an actor is enacted. As Mol explains, ANT invites us to tune in to these shifts and inversions, to linger on the uncertainties and consider how they might enrich our analyses.Footnote ¹⁵ The point is not to do away with human subjects and active verbs, but rather to propose another layer of complexity, to add to the repertoire of analysis so that we might trace more clearly the differences that are produced in a network. Such an orientation decouples agency from intention and will. It is an action or an event – not an intention – that manifests an agency. If something makes a difference, then it is an actor.

Although he is often criticized for supposedly ignoring power differences among human and non-human actors, a serious reading of Latour's work shows that he offers no general theory of non-human agency.Footnote ¹⁶ The questions of what an actor is in a given situation, and how it might act, belong properly to empirical investigation, not theoretical speculation.Footnote ¹⁷ One does not simply ‘grant’ agency to non-humans. Latour and Michel Callon stress this methodological emphasis repeatedly: ‘Our empirical program does not claim either that humans and artefacts are exactly the same or that they are radically different.’Footnote ¹⁸ The analyst places all actors on an equal ontological footing precisely to avoid abscinding, unwittingly, any of them from one's account; symmetry is merely the methodological starting point for an inquiry into the alliances, creases, and asymmetries of the real world, always encountered in medias res. Beginning an inquiry with these distinctions already in place ‘makes it impossible to register the different asymmetries that chains of associations produce when they encounter one another’.Footnote ¹⁹ Marking this distinction between method and theory is crucially important for assessing the various critiques levelled against Latour (by authors who often do not mark it), and also for distinguishing Latour's claims about non-human agency from other neo-materialist perspectives (such as neo-vitalism or object-oriented ontology).

In the introduction to his Oxford History of Western Music, Richard Taruskin advances a clear model of agency in music history. He writes:

Put aside that bit about agents only being people for a moment, and this passage becomes remarkable for its resonance with ANT thinking: Richard Taruskin, actor-network theorist! He wants to challenge pat explanations of historical change that appeal to the mysterious magic of things such as ‘organicism’ or ‘modernity’, insisting instead on mediation and local manifestations of agency that can be pointed to. So far, so good. But the difference of opinion on non-human agency is both less and more significant than it seems, for it turns at one level on a difference of definition. For Taruskin, agency requires sentience.Footnote ²¹ For ANT, an actor need not realize, understand, or intend the difference it makes, but it nonetheless should be accounted for in the analysis. In fact, despite its provocative stance and the shrill responses it has occasioned, ANT puts forward a weak claim about agency. Something makes a difference. What is it? This minimal notion of agency fosters uncertainty about what an actor might be. From this position of uncertainty, one investigates empirically in order to specify the nature of this agency, somewhere along the ‘many metaphysical shades between full causality and sheer inexistence’.Footnote ²² So ANT does not throw out intention or consciousness altogether, but it does suggest that differences get made in other ways, too.

In both perspectives, however, mediation is critically important. For example, Taruskin would insist that it was not a matter of historical necessity that an avant-garde developed in the mid-1800s, but rather an active bunch of true believers who put Karl Franz Brendel's Hegelian philosophy of history into practice in their music criticism.Footnote ²³ And yet, another level of mediation escapes this account; the reader of Neue Zeitschrift für Musik in Vienna is situated in a network that pulls together a cup of coffee, a cafe, and a text – Brendel is not there. He acts, of course, but this action is mediated by another actor, the printed copy of NZfM.Footnote ²⁴ Though it may specify in greater detail the different roles of the human and non-human, a conventional framing of Brendel as the real actor and the NZfM as a mere tool also risks overlooking the ways that the wider network constrains and enables human action. How many copies of NZfM were printed? Who bought them? How were they disseminated across Europe? Where did they fail to reach? In what ways was the spread of the New German School therefore uneven?Footnote ²⁵ The answers might be uninteresting, but that is a conclusion that one can reach only through empirical investigation. One ascribes agency to the journal not as a substantial theoretical claim about non-human agency, but as a weak methodological claim about how to conduct research; that is, by identifying actors minimally and then following them along pathways that might otherwise have receded from critical view. At the very least, misattributing effects to Brendel alone, at the expense of the inscription that does the work, is, in effect, an evasion. The methodological implication is that one should not decide in advance what an actor can (only) be.Footnote ²⁶

As an example of indeterminate agency in a given musical setting, consider the role played by the Jazz Composers Guild in the early decision of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians to restrict membership in that latter organization to African Americans. The New York composers who founded the Guild in 1964 attempted to take control of their means of artistic production by self-producing festivals and concerts and arranging rehearsal space for their membership. Short-lived, the organization buckled under economic pressures, and also under the pressures of racial discourse at the time. Although some members prided themselves on the interracialism of the group, others were suspicious or exasperated with their white colleagues. At one of the first meetings of the AACM, founded a few weeks after the Guild unravelled in May 1965, Muhal Richard Abrams referred to these conflicts mediated by race when he averred that

Within a few moments, the AACM would decide to remain an all-black organization. This is a productive example to consider with regard to the dynamics of agency. By making a difference on the proceedings, the Guild acts as a single entity in this meeting of the AACM; it is ‘nonfigurative’, as Latour would say, but it is still an actor.Footnote ²⁸ Like any single actor, this one sits at the intersection of many others, often at cross-purposes (the members of the Guild disagreed about the lessons – painful or affirmative – of interracialism). And, paradoxically, the Guild manifested an agency in Chicago after it had fallen apart in New York City.

But how does the Guild act? How does it touch the world in Chicago in May 1965, after it had ceased to exist as an organization? A consideration of these questions leads to a second methodological principle, which has to do with the nature of action in a network of associations – namely, the way that an action is always a kind of translation. Although coverage of the Guild had already appeared in The Nation, The New York Times, and some smaller jazz rags, a profile by Robert Levin in the May 1965 issue of Down Beat constituted a new level of attention.Footnote ²⁹ The piece was based on an interview with Guild co-founder Bill Dixon, who acted on this occasion as spokesperson for the organization. As we have seen, members of the nascent Chicago organization read this publication.

Pause to consider how agency was manifest in this historic moment. It is difficult to interview twelve people, and this difficulty results in our first translation – collective to spokesperson. As spokesperson, Dixon could not help but reduce and inflect the many conflicting voices in the organization, and Levin further translated his spoken account by converting it to written text, editing and narrativizing along the way. (‘To say something is to say it in other words’, comments Latour.)Footnote ³⁰ Once printed at Down Beat's production facility, this inscription enabled the Guild to act in a much wider range than it had before – copies of the magazine were shipped all over the world, including to Chicago, where Abrams read the account and performed one more translation when he reported on the Guild's experiences with interracialism (or, to be precise, he reported on his reading of an article that narrativizes one account by a spokesperson about the Guild's experience with interracialism). The AACM made a decision, and the Guild thereby acted one more time by inflecting that decision.

How does this action take place? Through a chain of translations that disperse, mediate, and circulate agency. Agency is not concentrated on a single entity, the Guild. It is leaky, enacted by collectives (the Guild, AACM, Down Beat), individuals (Dixon, Levin, Abrams), and materials (printed copies of Down Beat) that function as delegates – the Guild delegates Dixon, Dixon delegates Levin, Levin delegates a magazine, the magazine delegates a reader, and this reader, Abrams, delegates the AACM to act. In Chicago, the Guild expresses an agency that was not intentional. It is a drifting agency that translates action at great distances, but also becomes open to revision and interpretation in the course of this dispersal. Finally, this agency is deferred. It is not something that the Guild ‘had’ and then ‘used’ in a single, coherent moment. Rather, it unfolded fitfully in time and space.Footnote ³¹

There is one more point that I would like to clarify about the kind of action that involves a spokesperson or delegate, and that is that a spokesperson need not be a person. Many different kinds of things represent, summarize, exhort, cajole, afford, implore, or persuade. A book such as John Cage's Silence might end up in Blackwell's bookshop in Cambridge, where it is picked up by (say) a young guitarist named Fred Frith, who is in the middle of writing new music for his band, Henry Cow. The book represents Cage, speaking for him in his absence. It communicates some ideas about chance, and the budding composer integrates them into his new piece, ‘Nirvana for Mice’ (he uses playing cards to choose the durations and pitches of the melody).Footnote ³² Moreover, the book might make its own associations in the mind of its purchaser, associations that are distinct from the ones that Cage would make – perhaps it sits on the shelf next to Artaud's Theatre and Its Double, or Watts's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, or Cardew's Nature Study Notes, and maybe these casual, quotidian associations bend or twist Cage's pronouncements about experimental music. That's what happens when a network reaches far and lasts long: it drifts.Footnote ³³ It starts going places and interacting with things and people that could not be foreseen. It gets twisted up, misconstrued, repurposed, compromised, or revised. It moves, unpredictably. As I see it, the role of the historian is to document and explain these drifts and shifts in valence, not to dismiss them as perversions or ‘incorrect’ versions of Cagean thought (for example). Such dismissals, in fact, are all too common in exegetical scholarship on Cage's philosophy and aesthetics, scholarship that is so focused on explaining what Cage meant that it bypasses the realities of what Cage meant in the world, where his spokespersons travelled widely and often forged unforeseen connections.

A third methodological principle of ANT has to do with ontology. In contrast to the older philosophical meaning of ontology as a branch of general metaphysics concerned with being and existence, ANT writers tend to follow how networks of actors constitute, or enact, different realities; they emphasize specificities and differences, rather than universals.Footnote ³⁴ Such a conception of ontologies bears methodological implications: by not deciding ahead of time what we are going to find in the world, we allow entanglements to emerge in all of their messiness. I have previously argued that experimentalism was a network produced through the combined labour of composers, performers, audiences, patrons, critics, journalists, scholars, venues, publications, scores, technologies, media, a particular means of distribution, and the continuing effects of race, gender, class, and nation. What I mean by this ridiculous list is that experimentalism was necessarily a collection of many kinds of entities – human, material, technical, social, etc. – despite earlier narratives that stressed such musical concerns as ‘process over object’, performer freedom, spontaneity, and all the other usual descriptions. These latter qualities do not float independently in some abstract aesthetic space; they are contingent upon all the other actors that practice, perform, inscribe, and localize them in concrete ways. The ontology of experimentalism, therefore, is compound and contingent. Being means ‘being related’ and ‘being in the world’. Michel Serres gets at one aspect of this expanded view of ontology when he writes, ‘Our relationships, social bonds, would be airy as clouds were there only contracts between subjects. In fact, the object … stabilizes our relationships, it slows down the time of our revolutions … The object, for us, makes our history slow.’Footnote ³⁵ He means that relationships among humans require non-humans to keep them together; the social extends out across the objects we share.

I am specifically arguing against what I regard as the consensus view of any large musical or historical grouping, be it a style, movement, institution, or genre. Writers on experimentalism tend to begin with a list of people and works – a list that is already known – and then set forth the qualities they share. Lost are the uncertainties and volatilities of ontological formation, as well as the web of relations that support the resulting group. To tweak a phrase from Latour, associations do not hold together because they are true, but because they hold together we say that they are true.Footnote ³⁶ An ontology concerned with what things actually are in the world cannot allow all the things that do the holding together to disappear from its theoretical account, nor can it reduce and simplify the compound form of being that results from these associations.

What does a plural ontology of experimentalism look and sound like? It spread not just through books such as Silence, scores published by Peters, or concerts and festivals in West Germany, but also through sound recordings.Footnote ³⁷ Indeed, if a Cage scholar takes seriously this material multiplicity and follows her actors and their delegates, then she will begin to chart what could be called, at least after 1960, a ‘vernacular avant-garde.’Footnote ³⁸ Iggy Pop did not learn from Harry Partch by studying scores with the master; instead, it was a photo of the composer's fantastical cloud-chamber bowls on the back of his Plectra and Percussion Dances LP that set the young tinkerer to work on his own new instruments.Footnote ³⁹ And far removed from the seminar rooms of Darmstadt, the musicians of Henry Cow heard Cage the same way they heard Coltrane, through boutique and discount labels like CBS's Music of Our Time, Deutsche-Grammophon's Avantgarde, and Hor Zü Black Label, where Cage and his ilk mixed and mingled with the likes of Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza, Luciano Berio, Alice Coltrane, and the Soft Machine. Frith later recalled:

Henry Cow were not alone. One of their Cambridge tutors, the composer and journalist Tim Souster, did his part in clarifying and publicizing this vernacular avant-garde. In one article in the London Observer, he offered careful analyses of La Monte Young, Terry Riley, and Cornelius Cardew, along with the Soft Machine, the Who, and the Velvet Underground in his emergent grouping of adventurous musics. His recommendation of ‘some records to try out’ gives a good sense of this freely mixed category: White Light, White Heat (Velvet Underground), In C (Terry Riley), Avantgarde's The New Music compilation (featuring Karlheinz Stockhausen, Earle Brown, and many others), The Marble Index (Nico), and Variations IV (Cage).Footnote ⁴¹ This brief excursion through the vernacular avant-garde illustrates how experimentalism has been materialized and enacted differently in different spaces of reception and production – its being was always multiple.

The fourth and final methodological principle, performance, is imbricated with the previous three, but it deserves to be isolated and recognized on its own. An ANT approach to history traces activities, events, and procedures – in short, it provides accounts of the enactment of realities. In light of the other principles I have discussed, it is apparent that humans are not the only actors that do the performing, but also things as well. ANT thus makes its own contribution to the longstanding project of studying illocutionary effects. Although the thinkers in this tradition – Goffman, Austin, Derrida, and Butler – have been extraordinarily influential, ANT scholars generally choose to remain zoomed in closer on the performances they study, a methodological decision that leads one writer, Annemarie Mol, to describe what she does as ‘empirical philosophy’.Footnote ⁴² This approach stresses ethnographic and historical research into the realities of everyday performances, and, following Christopher Pinney and many others, it shows that ‘things happen’ in ways that are not reducible to discourse alone.Footnote ⁴³

This analytics of expanded performance can take us, in the words of Born, ‘beyond the practice turn’.Footnote ⁴⁴ She argues that musicology's recent interest in performance as a way out of its traditional investments in philology and the authoritative score has led to an over-emphasis on the micro-socialities of musical encounter, at the expense of investigating larger forms of social mediation. Carolyn Abbate's urgent argument for a refocusing of musicological inquiry towards the social and ethical dimensions of the performance moment can be seen as an exemplary case of this shift in music studies.Footnote ⁴⁵ Although music's drastic qualities lie beyond texts, a more expansive understanding of performance would complicate the isolatibility of the ineffable moment of musical performance. Who would deny the agency of a training regimen that develops fine motor skills in the hands, or the indispensability of the instrument and its history to those moments of transcendence that Abbate documents? (Abbate certainly would not.) To register these effects is not to say that there is not something specific and irreducible to music's ineffability, but rather to insist that there is never only the ineffable, that music's non-discursive effects and its momentariness form one corner of a network that also includes other moments, as well as durative, non-momentary objects and body practices. We will return to this point at the end of this article.

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With these clarified understandings of agency, action, ontology, and performance, we now turn to three areas of concern for music historians. The first is that of influence, which is a kind of event that often floats abstractly in musicological scholarship. In this work, scholars comb through musical details to turn up evidence of one figure's influence on another, or the influence of a whole genre on the works of a composer. In these accounts, influence becomes a technique for erasing all the mediators that actually perform the act of influence. Any relation of influence surely relies upon many things to work – how else does composer A touch composer B, separated by fifty years, than by virtue of her scores, performances, recordings, or writings? An ANT scholar takes it as axiomatic that ideas, aesthetics, or sensibilities do not travel from one place to another telepathically; rather, this stuff is mediated and enacted in the world through specific events and materialities.

The spread of an influence is always necessarily the spread of something else – speech (not very far), a person (farther), a manuscript (farther still), a published text (even farther), and then a score, a taped recording, a mass-produced LP or CD, a published interview, and so on. An ANT approach begins with this latter motley of stuff in a methodological reversal of the vague alchemy of conventional thinking about influence. Should not common sense dictate that we keep track of the material circulation of music's concrete forms? A striking example of this kind of approach can be found in Barry Shank's careful study of the soundworld inhabited by the Velvet Underground in the 1960s.Footnote ⁴⁶ Instead of assuming and accepting the provenance of the band's droning textures, Shank literalizes their connection to Indian classical music by tracing the specific effects of a single album, Ali Akbar Khan's Music of India: Morning and Evening Ragas (1956), on VU's two most important aesthetic progenitors, La Monte Young and Tony Conrad. (Both have recounted the shock and awe they experienced upon encountering this recording, the first LP-length document of Indian classical music to be released in the West.) It was not simply Indian classical music that influenced Young and Conrad (and, by extension, Cale and VU), but the specific ‘unending buzz’ of Shirish Gor's tamboura that made the difference. With this research, Shank has refused to allow influence to excuse itself from his analysis. In place of this elusive and undertheorized notion, he provides an empirically robust accounting of the nature of this connection, full of history, contingency, and singularity.

The problem of tracing connections across time and space is evidently quite difficult when the network in question exists in the second half of the twentieth century, when thousands upon thousands of LPs were moved from here to there along distribution channels that remain for the most part uncharted. The relative difficulty of such materially focused investigations of influence is no excuse not to do it, though, for this is perhaps the most important way that musical ideas are mediated in the period between 1965 and about 2000 – a large number of such mediations might, for example, come in the form of the cultural misunderstandings detailed by George Lipsitz, which we have already likened to a kind of drift.Footnote ⁴⁷ This conception of influence, revised to mean circulation, is all the more critical in cases of small-scale, marginalized, informal, or underground systems of distribution.Footnote ⁴⁸

Another topic that would benefit from an ANT-informed approach is genre, for what is a genre if not an unstable collection of related entities? Eric Drott's recent article on this subject is illuminating in many respects.Footnote ⁴⁹ In stark contrast to the rather fixed categories historically employed by musicologists, Drott's genres are fluid groupings that get made, remade, and altered through their many iterations. Moreover, these assemblages link together ‘a variety of material, institutional, social, and symbolic resources’. He writes, ‘The fact that such groupings must be continually enacted and re-enacted – no matter how stable, secure, or familiar they may appear – means that their legitimacy depends on how many people recognize them, take them up, and thereby reproduce the specific configuration of texts and contexts that they establish.’Footnote ⁵⁰ In other words, because a genre is a grouping (and not merely a group), there is always a chance that it will come to an end or become superseded by a competing association. Drott is careful to note, though, that this does not mean that we are free to make genres just as we please, for genres enlist material, discursive, institutional, and symbolic resources to perpetuate and strengthen a given grouping. It is one thing to dream up a new genre at the bar one night with a few friends, but something entirely different for a bricks-and-mortar store to partition its shelf space in a particular way that channels the movement of its shoppers – the first grouping comes easily and is easily undone, but not the second. Another more contemporary example would be the iTunes algorithm that leads the browser from one known knot of musical taste to another likely, but unknown, one; such taste technologies both respond to and create consumer patterns. They form structures that are revisable, but within limits; this is what Latour calls an asymmetry. ‘Act as you wish, so long as this cannot easily be undone’, he writes.

When Iggy Pop, for example, was hanging out with the ONCE Group in Ann Arbor, experimenting with contact microphones and homemade instruments and listening to free jazz records, his career could have unfolded in a number of different directions. Once he signed with Elektra, however, certain directions were foreclosed as rock was increasingly emphasized – fugitive relations were converted into lines of force. This affiliation determined bookings, press, distribution, and audiences, and could not easily be undone.

One particular virtue of Drott's model is how effectively he balances the different types of actors that make up a grouping. Yes, genres enlist many kinds of humans (musicians, listeners, marketers, producers), technologies (MP3 players, instruments), and architectures (concert halls, clubs, classrooms), but they also enlist more fleeting (or less material) elements such as expectations, behaviours, and competences for listeners, or even – I would add – certain favoured gestures and modes of bodily comportment that are readable for competent participants in a genre. The analytical sensitivities of ANT, and especially its manner of conceiving of ontology, make it possible for us to register fully the hybrid reality of genres. In place of stability, cohesion, and homogeneity, Drott's theory offers only contingency: genre without guarantees. In this approach, all actors are thought to engage in practices of partial belonging and ambivalent collaboration, so it is the stability of genre formations that needs to be explained, rather than their transgression or destabilization.

Finally, we might approach context differently from a perspective informed by ANT and other recent social theory. This notion – so widespread that its appearance often escapes notice completely – does a lot of unrecognized work in music studies. One might refer to a context to explain the intentions of historical actors, the social constraints they might be performing within, the discursive or institutional setting that affects modes of listening, pressures from the political domain, or the situated meanings of a musical gesture. Placing a musical work or historical figure into context has often served to critique claims for music's autonomy. But we often turn to context to include in our narratives all the stuff which seem possibly relevant, but not as relevant as the other more important things that are at the centre of the study. But why this prevarication? Something either makes a difference or it does not. If you remove it from a situation, does the situation change?

The danger of context is that it accepts and uses as explanations those stabilized contingencies that are themselves the formations that need to be explained, rather like the experience of Joan W. Scott's famous critique.Footnote ⁵² As Anna Tsing writes, ‘[C]ontext gets in the way: context identifies the actors in advance, making it impossible to attend to how they make themselves through networks.’Footnote ⁵³ Moreover, context identifies entire domains in advance; for example, the political domain – to take one frequently invoked context – is not some self-same, coherent structure that can be shown to influence, enable, or form the domain of the musical. No, it is – like music – a variegated, plural network that is persistently re-enacted in patterns and ruptures that strengthen or weaken existing attachments. When we speak of music reproducing as well as affecting politics, we are really attempting to come to terms with a network of associations – neither strictly musical nor political – that falls across, and mixes up, disciplinary assumptions about what counts as context. Latour comments on this impurity:

Context always harbours assumptions about how the boxes are drawn and where the arrows should point, but ANT resists any such normative presumptions. As with agency or action, Latour's method aids analysis by multiplying uncertainty: when I invoke context, which pre-existing categories come along for the ride? In using these categories, how might I find myself drawing borderlines that are at odds with the ones drawn by my historical actors?

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By understanding agency as an eventful relation among actors of all kinds, and by conceiving of ontology as contingent and plural, and observing action as a series of mediations that circulate reference – by taking on these methodological principles, we are equipped to meet and describe the world with an appropriate level of complexity. ANT presents theoretical opportunities to music scholars, but that does not mean that the method is without weakness. Every method is limited. As we have already observed, temporality is not a strongly operative term in Latour's work, but it has long been a distinguishing feature of Born's anthropology.Footnote ⁵⁵ Her recent methodological writings shed new light on the temporalities of cultural production and invention.Footnote ⁵⁶ Like Latour, she is interested in micro-interactions and their implications, but more than Latour, she explains these implications with reference to different orders of temporality. In an important article that sets out the terms of a renewed theory of cultural production, she recapitulates known critiques of Bourdieu – his failure to account for diachrony, transformation, and change – and offers instead a four-level schema of the multiple temporalities of the art object:

This schema allows Born to account for invention in concrete ways, and it does so in a more variegated manner than that allowed for by Deleuzian or Bergsonian models, which might flatten out time to a single kind of unfolding.Footnote ⁵⁸

Born's theoretical innovation constitutes a trenchant challenge to the theorist using actor-networks to understand music history, but we can also use the concerns of ANT to inflect her contribution. Each of her four orders of time operates in concrete ways. Large philosophical constructions of cultural time, such as ‘postmodernism’, for example, are large to the extent that they are built up from many discourses, practices, and objects – they are temporal categories that are enacted and materialized. The differences in orders, which Born so precisely delineates, might be seen as differences in the dispersal and duration of groupings. A historical category such as postmodernism pulls together many things (such as cultural texts and theories) into materialities (such as books, videotapes, LPs, scores, and magazines) and performances (such as concerts, broadcasts, screenings, lectures, or idle chatter) that have spread widely – and unevenly – across the globe. By contrast, a performance such as ‘Forty Minutes’ (1974) by the Spontaneous Music Ensemble also gathers many things (musicians, instruments, audiences, recording equipment) into materialities (soundwaves, LPs, CDs, digital sound files) and performances (a concert, a playback), but it does so on a smaller scale. The duration of these two temporal spans varies widely, but they are both networks of association that become delineated through new and repeated acts of grouping. But ANT's attempts to erase the differences between micro- and macro-scales have tended to concentrate on ‘strength’ in terms of spatial metaphors, suggesting that there remains much work to be done before the method can match the analytical detail of Born's orders.Footnote ⁵⁹

An example can illustrate how ANT might stimulate specific sensitivities in history writing. Two versions of experimental music existed through the 1950s, one focused on technological or scientific invention and the other on sonic invention; to a certain extent, these two versions met in the contact zone of electronic music. By the mid-1960s, the sonic orientation, promulgated most strongly by Cage, had won out. Why?Footnote ⁶⁰ There are surely many reasons, not least of which was Cage's growing fame, represented for specialists by the publications of the Indeterminacy LP, his scores, and Silence by 1961, and for popular audiences by the appearance of Calvin Tompkins's long profile in the New Yorker in 1965. But in the electronic music realm, the ascendance of Cage's version of experimental music coincided with the unprecedented flood of cheap transistors into the consumer market, which made it possible for brave dabblers to experiment with live electronic sound outside the large, more conservative institutions such as university-based electronic music studios. Moreover, the new availability of inexpensive electronic equipment meant that young technologists could more easily be absorbed into Cage's narrative.Footnote ⁶¹ The emerging hegemony of Cage's position is a story of multiple temporalities – the temporal arc of the composer's career, as well as the increasingly elaborate expansion and unfolding of his artistic corpus, but also that of a much larger techno-material shift owing to the post-war surplus in the US and Japan, not to mention the stockpiles of cheap military electronics left over from World War II. Cage's version of experimentalism was successful to the extent that it came out of strong alliances with these diverse actors.

One might conceive of Born's approach to temporality as a critique of Latourian methodology, but it is also an exhortation to think harder about how one's approach to history writing might be enriched by ANT's repertoire of questions and terms. In turn, a Latourian approach suggests an area of further inquiry for Born, who follows Alfred Gell by concentrating in her theoretical work on the agency of artworks, as opposed to ordinary, non-aesthetic objects. By urging us to keep in view all those actors that have effects (even the lowly transistor), ANT makes room for non-aesthetic, quotidian temporalities in the analysis of uneven historical networks: the materialities that are theorized in this account are not simply art objects, but all kinds of objects that impinge on cultural history.Footnote ⁶²

Born's generative work also suggests a second weak spot that ANT shares with much contemporary social theory: the murky distinction between analytic and ethno-ontologies.Footnote ⁶³ In other words, does the scholar bring ontological presuppositions to the study, or does she allow the ontologies of her actors to emerge? Latour's insistence that ‘actors know what they do and we have to learn from them not only what they do, but how and why they do it’ has proven problematic to other commentators.Footnote ⁶⁴ The perspective of the ethnographic or historical subject is obviously important for the ways it allows us to suspend belief in our own ontologies and trace new, emerging, or surprising configurations, but no actor is cognisant of the forces being exerted in every situation, and Latour's nonchalant insistence on individual judgements would seem to ignore the work of repetitive, widely dispersed and habituated patterns of association – the enduring configurations of race and gender come to mind.Footnote ⁶⁵ Furthermore, we might turn Latour against himself and insist that unwitting actors make effects that they do not intend.Footnote ⁶⁶ In fact, contrary to Latour's apparent ethno-ontological position, ANT also advances a rather normative conception of ontology – to its credit. It may not decide from the outset what it will discover, but the method leads almost necessarily to the kind of ontological multiplicities discussed earlier in this article. To take one example, the work-concept that Lydia Goehr has analysed so brilliantly may be the basis for a narrative that privileges the composer-hero over other musical actors, or that idealistically denies music's material and social forms, or that removes the work from history or social responsibilities, but this does not mean that it constitutes an ontology.Footnote ⁶⁷ Rather, as Goehr argues, it is a concept that emerges historically and eventually regulates musical practice and discourse. Accounts of musical works that take this work-concept for granted simply ignore the many historical, social, and material mediations that occur whenever music is performed.Footnote ⁶⁸

The ANT scholar is concerned with adding back in these many mediators, whether the historical or ethnographic informant recognizes them or not; in this sense, the analyst maintains a privileged position in tracing the outlines of a given network, Latour's assertions to the contrary notwithstanding. As Anna Tsing has pointed out, an actor's discursive representation of a world and his place in it may not accord with his ‘untheorized assemblages of practice’.Footnote ⁶⁹ An empirical description of the latter can be brought to bear on the former; where there is discrepancy between the two, such a comparison would constitute a mode of critique.

Although commentators are correct to note that ‘race, class, gender, colonialism, and industrial interests tend to be absent from actor-network analyses’, it does not necessarily follow that this absence owes to flaws in the method itself.Footnote ⁷⁰ In spite of Latour's blindness to the institutional effects of gender and race, ANT does offer tools for analysing cultural politics, particularly in its approach to ontology. This ontological politics unfolds along three axes. First, ANT enlarges the scope of its representations to include previously ignored actors, and it insists on their relationality: no actor is ever alone. Second, it highlights controversies over the stabilizations of relations that we call facts, and thus demands that we register uncertainties and contingencies – things could be otherwise. Third, ANT's ontological politics reconfigures the domain of the political itself. As Alcipandi and Hassard write:

Therefore, to say that ANT is uncritical because it is primarily concerned with providing rich, realist descriptions of the world would be to dismiss too hastily a methodology that can make specific contributions. For instance, time and again I encounter difficulties introducing critical studies of race to my undergraduate students for whom race analysis can only mean searching for evidence of individual prejudice. To this most superficial register, I endeavour to add others: the ways in which race thinking becomes materialized in housing policy, or how it is choreographed in styles of holding one's body, or where it might be inscribed indirectly within texts, or how it might be woven into fundamental concepts such as property, creativity, or medicine. Human responsibility has to remain in the picture (‘I didn't discriminate against your mortgage application – it was my federal housing policy!’), but these responsibilities are always entwined, enabled, fettered, or extended.Footnote ⁷² The point of these examples, I tell my students, is that the being of race is multiple, as the work of Amade M'Charek and Robin Bernstein makes clear.Footnote ⁷³ This ontological description of race thinking – the practicalities involved in enacting its reality, as Mol might say – is not an acritical scholarly practice, especially when it is offered up in response to the ideology of colour-blindness that constantly surprises in its very intransigence. But it is not the kind of critique that blows away the haze of ideology to reveal the facts underneath, nor does it dismiss those facts as so many inventions of the powerful.Footnote ⁷⁴ Rather, like Foucault, Latour wishes to detail the ‘precarious and fragile’ history of facts – which are very real even though they emerge from a ‘network of contingencies’.Footnote ⁷⁵

What are the relations that make up a given object of study? What are the controversies that have accompanied its unfolding in time and space? How have differences been rendered into equivalences? What were the trials and compromises that produced a given configuration? Latour investigates such questions using a renewed empiricism that does not merely report facts based on evidence, but instead accounts for the multifarious labourers (human and not) that make something true but open to revision. And yet, even a renewed empiricism is not a transparent window on the past. No scholar can include every actor in a historical account (unless you want to discuss the role of gravity in the composition of Music of Changes); one must make decisions about which actors to follow, or where one draws the boundary lines of relevance. What are the assumptions that motivate a programme of research, that guide the choice of relevant actors, and that shape the narrative that results? And what about those moments when the evidence is slim – a special problem for historians – or practically non-existent? Is the ANT theorist barred in these cases from speculation based on theoretical models? This would be a high price to pay for a renewed empiricism.Footnote ⁷⁶

Anna Tsing offers an elegant and promising response to this quandary with her idea of worlding. If, as she argues, actors engage in practices of world-making that always include gaps, misunderstandings, and omissions, then the analyst must struggle against two enemies at once. On the one hand, we resist our own privileged contexts and domains, which pre-structure our investigations and identify our actors in advance. On the other hand, we always come up against the limits of our informants' understanding of their worlds, which are never complete. By imagining ‘relevant webs of relationality’, Tsing's analyst transforms the acritical realm of context into a space of more heuristic speculation about strange worlds, which should be, at best, ‘partial, tentative sketch maps’.Footnote ⁷⁷ In this sense, ‘[W]orlding offers provisional guides both for and against disorientation; when we cannot identify figures, we grasp at the worlding projects of our informants and start making up our own in translation of theirs.’Footnote ⁷⁸ Like Latour, she seeks an alternative to the presumption of an omniscient observer, but unlike him, she defends a limited power of observation, and will grant her actors the same kind of partial understanding – she models an imaginative back-and-forth between analytic and ethno-ontologies, one that recognizes the limits of both.Footnote ⁷⁹ For instance, in my research on experimental music in 1960s London, I was surprised to discover that most of my historical actors there had interpreted and explained Cagean indeterminacy in terms of performer creativity and expression. My tentative sketch map of their worlding projects – the venues they booked, the publications they contributed to and read, the musical and business collaborations they forged, and the conversations about history and aesthetics they shared – led me to conclude that indeterminacy was twisted up with free improvisation to a far greater extent than I had initially imagined. But the narrative that I wrote – in which Cagean experimentalism had taken a swerve into jazz and popular musics, as one part of an ambivalent congeries of musical spontaneity – initially struck one of my actors as strange, because it jumped off the well-worn tracks laid down by previous accounts of the music. In this case, the worlds imagined by the researcher and the historical actor were both revised in a back-and-forth process.Footnote ⁸⁰

To sum up, a Latourian accounting of networks does not cover up asymmetries, but instead issues a realist description of associations and the hierarchies and inequalities they create; it is ontologically indeterminate, allowing the shape of the networks to emerge empirically. It documents how actors forge associations, thereby denaturalizing inherited accounts and restoring contingency to narratives of genesis. It traces networks comparatively, combining ethno-ontology with an analysis of untheorized assemblages of practice. Its attention to and revision of relevant webs of relationality provides the grounds for noticing where diverse actors make and maintain cuts and perform externalizations. In these ways, a desire like the one for a more inclusive, socially diverse experimentalism will make demands of methodology but it cannot make demands of historical reality, which unfolded along patterns and structures that were most certainly not inclusive. Attending carefully to this distinction will temper the impression that ANT is only interested in writing the stories of history's victors. It should be clear by now that ANT is a research methodology that is committed to empirical work. A rigorous and theoretically elaborative empiricism will respect the heterogeneity of different actors, and it will follow closely the events that produce their arrangement. Resolutely nominalist, ANT resists theory only insofar as that theory might reduce or simplify a complex cultural field that might lead us to new theorizations if we attend carefully to its specifics, rather than treating them as ‘merely illustration’.Footnote ⁸¹ At its best, then, ANT helps us to tell surprising, interesting, and new stories about music and its many allies.

* * *

One might point out that I have adumbrated principles and methods that amount to little more than careful historical and social analysis. That is partially true, but ANT offers a fresh way to study different kinds of grouping, the role of non-humans in the creation and extension of those groupings, and the indeterminate shapes that result. We began this article by noting some problems with the language of networks, and I would like to point out one more: networks imply the simple connection of pre-existing actors. The word gives no sense of the movement and events through which these arrangements come into a contingent kind of being, or how the actors gain their characteristics through the many kinds of association. With this in mind, I have begun to think of the things that I study as ‘historical ecologies’, though one might bring the concerns of actor-network theory to bear on them.Footnote ⁸² An ecology is a web of relations, an amalgamation of organic and inorganic, or biological and technological, elements that are interconnecting and mutually affecting. In other words, like experimentalism or anything else, an ecology is an emergent, hybrid grouping that connects many different kinds of things. It has real boundaries that mark it off as distinct from its surrounding environment, but those boundaries are variable and open. And, just as ANT weakens the claim to agency in order to highlight the wide range of differences that an actor might make, an ecology contains a whole gradient of relationships, from indifferent coexistence to highly interested antagonism. Most of all, an ecology presents a variegated temporality, with cyclic processes and repeating patterns of iteration that create dynamic kinds of stasis, as well as the possibility of change.Footnote ⁸³ Each of the relationships in an ecology has its own history of emergence, change, and decay; some associations are fleeting, while others perdure by virtue of strong connections to other lasting actors. Most importantly, an ecology is a haphazard, unpredictable conglomeration of things and processes. From this perspective, distinctions between social, technological, or musical domains are difficult to make; an ecology wanders across these three and many more. Methodologically, the implication is that we do not pre-restrict our investigations to the musical domain, but rather throw out the idea of the musical altogether. This kind of work responds to Mol's observation that ‘to be is to be related’. The term historical ecology is not elegant, but it is the best thing I can come up with to capture something about what it means to study the emerging past with these principles in mind.

In conclusion, I wish to raise the possibility that the methodological sensitivities I have surveyed can provide the grounds for fully understanding the emerging interest in (or return to) music's agency, evident in the recent work of Barry Shank and James Currie, among others.Footnote ⁸⁴ In this work, ‘the music itself’ returns with a difference. Its power is distinct but inseparable from other agencies, because it arrives in a tangle. Registering the specific effects that musical sound contributes to an ecology is a scholarly endeavour quite distinct from the earlier project of isolating its ‘purely musical’ characteristics. In that old musicology, sound's wild couplings fell out of the analytical picture, but in the ecological approach, relations are the units of analysis. As I hope to have shown, ANT offers useful tools for speaking of alliances of all kinds, but there remain question marks with the method and its fit with projects of music history. Some of these question marks concern the uses and misuses music scholars might make of ANT, and others concern the method's treatment of time, reflexivity, and critique. Bearing these uncertainties in mind, the theoretical tactics sketched here are one writer's attempt at developing tools to grapple with the history of an untidy world.