Zones of non-communication: Music and the relative immanence of capitalism

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to show not what music is, but what music as a sort of political practice can do in the age of contemporaneity. The age of contemporaneity is defined by the relative immanence of capitalism, which is structured as a society of control on the level of the socius. On the one hand, capitalism consists of a certain number of axioms that enable the denumeration of flows, while, on the other, the society of control forges a connection between the capitalist axiomatic and the infra-individual levels of every (in)dividual. In an ontological and epistemological framework structured like that, art in general and music in particular create zones of non-communication that break affective connections between the infra-individual and the trans-individual in the form of the axiomatic and society of control. With affective non-directionality, music produces a space-time wherein different and new connections between affects may occur. Those affective connections are not exclusively tied to axiomatic denumeration, that is, the production of surplus value, but potentially to the production of surplus life.